When Senator Baucus finally emerged from the "hundreds of hours" of work trying to wrest a bipartisan agreement out of his gang of six, there was no one at the podium with him. Not only was there no bipartisan agreement, there wasn't even a Democrat who would stand with him on this bill. Not even Kent Conrad! And, within a matter of a few short days, Committee members had submitted for consideration more than 500 amendments to his bill.
During Committee deliberations, in advancing his Public Option Amendment, Senator Rockefeller called the Baucus Bill, without a public option, a $483 billion giveaway to the insurance industry. Has this changed in any way as the Committee has droned on and on last week and this? Is it no longer a giveaway? Have they removed the mandate? How can these Democrats vote to send this bill to the floor of the Senate? And what is to be done to stop them?
Follow me, below the fold.
Ever since the public option amendments went down on a vote of the Senate Finance Committee Republicans and their shameful Democratic allies, I have been calling and writing my Senator, Chuck Schumer, and Rockefeller, Stabenow and Cantwell, asking them to vote "no" on the bill in the final committee vote. I have mentioned this in several comments over the past few days, and have gotten very little response. So, I decided to put it in a diary for all to see.
Why wouldn't we hold these Senators to the obvious and logical conclusion of their statements about this bill? Doesn't it make sense to call upon them to put their votes where their well held opinions lie? What will have changed about the bill that makes it worthy of support? Nothing big, that's for sure.
If we were successful in defeating the Baucus bill in Committee, then there would be only one bill on the Senate floor and it would have a public option in it. This seems to me to be a much shorter route to the conference committee's emerging with a public option for final vote than is the "merge Baucus and HELP, pray a public option emerges" approach.
Not to mention, Baucus himself has declined to vote for these amendments because, he says, there will not be 60 votes on the floor for them. Well, will there be 60 votes on the floor for his bill? I sure as hell hope not! The logical outcome of that rationale is that his bill should be defeated in the Committee.
Eve? Slink? Jane? Kossacks? Please join me in advocating this position. We could short cut the process and get to the floor with the public option Ted Kennedy's Committee sent forward. Now there's a goal.