I’ve had a few questions about why I’m pushing for Plan B (just passing the bill through the House) rather than Plan A (completing the negotiations and passing the revised bill through the senate before Brown, if he wins, is seated). Here are my thoughts.
First, a couple readers have asked, ‘Hey, just a few days ago, your reporters were reporting on how long it’ll take to seat Brown. What happened to that?’ Well, we’re still reporting on it. We have a piece coming out on it shortly. But there’s a difference between what happens in our news pages and in the editor’s blog, which is some approximation of an editorial page in a newspaper, though obviously we do a lot of reporting here too. It’s critical to find out just what the options are on the senate side. And I’ve been surprised to see that neither Dems or GOPers have really canvassed all the available precedents. The point I’m making is a different one.
In any case, here’s my thought. For reasons we’ll explain in the piece we’re about to run, it really doesn’t seem possible to seat Brown in under two weeks.
So let’s assume that’s true. If you go back to the senate, you’ve got a couple weeks to 1) finish the negotiations, 2) spend the 4 or 5 days it takes under the rules break a filibuster, 3) get a new scoring out of the CBO, which is unpredictable on the substance and also take an undetermined amount of time and 4) once again give Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson and who knows Kent Conrad get another opportunity to jack everyone up with new hand-wringing over the bill or Brown’s seating or just whatever.
Put that all together and it just seems seems like it’s going to be awfully hard to get that done in a couple weeks — to put it mildly. Maybe it’s doable. And if it is, great, do it. But everything we’ve seen from the senate this year tells me it’s not. And it leaves too many opportunities for various bad actors.
So that’s why I think it’s probably a better and quite possibly the only option to pass the senate bill through the House. It’s purely a pragmatic call.
