TPM Reader R chimes in …
I can’t tell you how angry I am with the house progressives that are not willing to pass the Senate Bill. I live in Rep. Nadlers district in NY and called all of his offices this morning. And while I cannot say for certain, my impression was that they were getting a lot of backlash about the statements made by Barney Frank and Anthony Weiner. The honest truth is that moderate Democrats and Conservative Democrats have been taking tough votes all year. Now it’s time for progressives to support this president and take a tough vote for once and pass the senate bill.
TPM Reader JB gets his call back from Barney Frank and learns about the “new reality” …
Congressman Frank called me and I had the opportunity to speak with him. He was very annoyed by my characterization of his statements as chickening out, chastising me for not communicating as an adult. I told him that I thought that as a senior member of the delegation, as the first statement out, he set the tone for the health care bill discussion and set it in a negative direction. He told me that it didn’t come out of thin air, but from discussions with other members. He told me that being a single-issue voter is not a smart way to be. I told him that I work in health care and saw what it was like when patients didn’t have insurance and suffered for it, so I feel strongly about it. I asked him when the democrats would have a more favorable congressional position than now and he had no answer.
I went to lunch about an hour and a half ago and came back to learn the president has decided to throw in the towel. I guess we have our answer.
The President sat down today for an interview with ABC’s George Stephanpolus, and while only a portion of the transcript of the interview has been posted online, I’m not hearing a rallying cry from Obama or seeing evidence that he’s applying pressure to keep House Democrats in line and on track to pass health care reform right away:
I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don’t, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill.
Move quickly to coalesce?
The President also tells ABC that he is opposed to trying to ram anything through the Senate until Sen.-elect Scott Brown is seated.
During hearings this morning on the Flight 253 incident, Sen. John McCain repeated the now-debunked claim that the suspected bomber had bought a one-way ticket to Detroit from Nigeria. The administration official testifying tries to correct McCain, but he will have none of it. Watch.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee is going to conduct a “forensic examination” of each 2010 Senate race to prevent a repeat of the Massachusetts debacle, Sen. Robert Menendez tells TPMDC.
Jonathan Cohn, on why breaking up the health care bill into a bunch of pieces and passing them separately is bad policy and even worse politics.
A couple of TPM readers from Massachusetts were able to get Barney Frank himself on the phone this morning and sent in their accounts of the conversations.
TPM Reader AS:
I live in Barney Frank’s district, and I called his office this morning. To my surprise, he took my call and I asked him why on earth couldn’t the House simply pass the Senate version of the health care bill. He told me straight up that the votes weren’t there to pass the Senate bill. He said that labor is totally against it, the abortion caucus is against it, and more than a few progressives were against it.
It seems like things are moving even faster than one might have anticipated. The House Democrats have scheduled a caucus meeting for this afternoon. That’s where they’re either going to snap out of it, get their act together and move forward or decide that they’re just going to give up and collapse into a bowl of jello.
One point to note: so far the big freak-out/fainting couch statements from the House have come from the left, not the center-right of the Dem caucus. That may prove to be a very important pattern.
But again, this is a classic case of mob panic in the House. It’s all down to the president. He’s the one who can steady these wobblies.