It was clear for about a week that Martha Coakley was probably going to lose last night’s senate election. And anticipating that defeat we started talking about the ‘X Factor’, whether the shock or demoralization of a Massachusetts defeat would change the vote calculus in the House. But I really thought the problem was going to be on the right of the Democratic caucus — various Blue Dogs, Freshmen/Sophomores, Red State Dems, etc. But that does not seem to be what’s happening. According to Greg Sargent, a group of House liberals just met with Speaker Pelosi and told her categorically that they won’t vote for the Senate bill.
On the one hand, as David notes, I’m not sure how much weight we should put in that ‘categoricalness’ of the claim since the House progressives have crossed a bunch of lines they drew in the sand this year. But it shows you where they are.
And along the lines of the sort of denial these folks seem to be in, there’s this graf from Greg’s piece …
Tellingly, House liberals also urged Pelosi to consider passing individual pieces of reform through the House as individual bills, and sending them to the Senate to challenge the upper chamber to reject them, Grijalva tells me. Liberals said this approach would be preferable to passing the Senate bill.
They really do think they’re going to get another bite at the apple.
