Bart Stupak successfully hijacked the healthcare debate, again, threatening to bring the whole bill down if he can't take abortion coverage away from millions and millions of women. The situation is still very much in flux, but it would appear that his push for an enrollments correction resolution was floated by leadership, and possibly tanked by the pro-choice caucus, who according to the twitterverse, threatened to bolt if he got his vote. Here's CNN's Evan Glass:
"There is no deal" on abortion says Woolsey, adding that all pro-choice female Dems will bolt if Stupak prevails.
That was more or less confirmed by Henry Waxman, who told AP that "'the likely outcome' is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi will move ahead without the votes of a group of abortion opponents," and by the fact that Stupak indefinitely postponed the press conference he had scheduled for this morning. Two anonymous pro-life GOP members told NRO that he cancelled (or postponed?) his press conference because his enrollment corrections effort was rejected, and that "he's finished with Pelosi."
It looks like leadership might be changing their approach from negotiating with him to leaning on him. A bigger gun than the pro-choice caucus has apparently been brought in to influence Stupak: the dean of his Michigan delegation, John Dingell.
Veteran Democratic Rep. John Dingell vowed Saturday to work to defeat fellow Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak (D) on abortion in the healthcare bill.
Dingell, the longest-serving member of the House whose career has centered around healthcare reform, said he would work to "beat" Stupak's efforts to add additional restrictions on federal support for abortion to the healthcare bill before the House....
"I'm going to try to show him the error of his ways, and I'm also going to try to see to it that we beat him on this," Dingell said on MSNBC. "Because this is a matter of the utmost humanitarian and economic concern to this nation."
And a new press conference on women's health care has been scheduled at 1:30 EDT, by pro-choice caucus member Carolyn Maloney that may or may not address the Stupak problem.
What to watch for in the next few hours: will the Rules Committee (streaming on C-SPAN2) see a Stupak provision to create a trigger for deeming the Senate bill passed only upon passage of his proposed concurrent resolution. If that doesn't come up, the deal is definitively dead.
But there could be another trick up Stupak's sleeve, with an assist from Republicans: the motion to recommit. There's been a trend in the last several years of Dems being more or less cut loose by leadership to vote with Republicans on MTRs to buck up their Blue Dog cred. The GOP could very well offer the Stupak language as the MTR, which could tempt a number of Dems.
Stupak could still kill this whole thing. The whip count is that tight.
Update: Pelosi says "no separate vote" for Stupak or anyone else.
Just off the House floor moments ago, Pelosi told reporters there will be "no separate vote" on abortion or any other measure.
And Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a leading pro-choice progressive, said they're moving ahead without him. "There's not going to be any deal made with Mr. Stupak...there's been no deal whatsoever. He's been told that his language is not going to be added to the legislation," she told me this morning....
"We think we have the votes regardless, and we're going to be moving forward," Schakowsky said. "Yes. We do think we have the votes without him."
Hopefully Schakowsky is right, and they've got those votes. It's quite possible that some of the Stupak crowd actually listen to the nuns and are willing to desert him.
Update 2: Greg Sargent reports conversations are ongoing. What's being publicly floated now, tweeted by Marc Ambinder and Jon Cohn is that some kind of executive order from Obama to "clarify abortion funding policy" is still on the table.
