Senate to House: Ball is in your court on health care reform; we’re focusing on jobs now.
Village Voice: “Scott Brown Wins Mass. Race, Giving GOP 41-59 Majority in the Senate”
Over the next forty-eight hours we’ll know the answers to two questions: whether there will be Health Care Reform and whether the Democrats will have any shot going into the 2010 election. Everybody who gets the politics has made clear that it’s political suicide for the Democrats not to finish health care reform done. And it seems clear that the only way to do that is for the House to pass the existing senate bill and then revise it in subsequent legislation.
Congressional Democrats on the right and left are putting forward arguments for running for the Hills. Barney Frank says reform should be allowed to die. Bill Delahunt says Democrats should return to an ‘incremental approach’. Evan Bayh says the whole thing should be dropped. And we’ll hear from many more people over the course of the day saying similar things.
The White House has made clear that health care can’t be dropped and that the House should pass the senate bill. But it’s speaking feebly. David Axelrod is saying he thinks it’s the right way to go. The president has said nothing. At most the White House is speaking with all the authority and volume of blind quotes. Which is to say they’re barely speaking at all.
The only thing that is going to stop the rush for the exits is a clear statement from the president. But so far, silence.
TPM Reader JB checks in …
Barney Frank is my congressman (since I moved in August). I registered my extreme displeasure and told the staff that we didn’t send him to congress to ensure his re-election, we sent him there to get the job done. I then told them that as a life-long democrat, if he didn’t vigorously support health care reform, I would support any primary challenger and, if Frank won again, any opponent because I would at least believe that his opponent would do what he promised and not chicken out. The pleasant woman answering the phone told me to expect a call back. I will let you know if that happens.
A number of Democrats have come forward since yesterday evening to say that it would be wrong to pass health care through the senate again using Paul Kirk’s placeholder vote before Scott Brown is seated. But in addition to that, we’re hearing from some people in the House of all places that it would somehow be improper for the House to just pass the existing senate bill because Brown’s election has delegitimized that bill. But this is clearly preposterous. The filibuster is an existing rule of the senate. Until it’s changed, everyone has to deal with that fact. But there’s no democratic legitimacy tied to it — it is itself a procedural dodge.
Here’s what I mean.
It wouldn’t be any problem today to pass the Senate bill again or even the House bill in the senate if Republicans would allow it to simply come to a vote. But they won’t. Brown’s election has simply made it easier for them to prevent the senate from voting on the bill. There’s no democratic process issue to be respected there. The senate already got a chance to vote. And it passed. If given another chance to vote it would easily pass again. There’s no democratic principle involved — to put it mildly — in respecting the senate GOP’s increased ability to block a vote from taking place when one already has taken place.
It’s amazing the nonsense some people come up with.
On MSNBC this morning, Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-MA) called for Congress to carve up the health care bill and “have discrete votes” on “a series of bills that were brought up, over the next several months.” Watch.
Hearings get underway in Congress today on the Christmas Day attempted bombing of Flight 253. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Indications coming out of the White House are that they clearly see the peril of letting health care reform languish now that Democrats have only 59 Senate votes. David Axelrod tells Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein:
If we don’t pass it … then the caricature created by the insurance industry and opponents in Congress will prevail and everyone will have to live with that. There is no political sense to that and I hope people will see that and move forward.
The irony of course is that the most vexing problem isn’t in the Senate, where the seat was lost, but in the House, where Democrats from both the progressive and conservative wings of the party show few signs of being prepared to move the Senate bill, let alone quickly.
Barney Frank’s comment throwing in the towel on the Senate heath care bill “deals a potentially fatal blow to the legislation,” according to The American Spectator.
I’ve always been such a big admirer of Barney Frank, on so many different levels. So I was genuinely surprised, really shocked to see this statement he put out tonight that is just an embodiment of fecklessness, resignation, defeatism and just plan folly. The gist of his point is that that’s it for health care reform. If a few Republican senators will come across the aisle and help maybe it will happen. But if not, that’s it. Amazing. Just amazing.