Sen. Feingold comes out for the senate bill; but not before placing the blame for the demise of the public option on President Obama.
Sen. Webb’s office put out a statement this evening declaring his intention (which will already knew) to be one of the 60 votes to move the health care bill on to passage. I reprint it in full below the fold. But in the process of going through his rather pained journey to supporting the bill he says this …
“Over the past year, the process of debating this issue often overwhelmed the substance of fixing the problem. The Obama Administration declared health care reform to be a major domestic objective, but they did not offer the Congress a bill. Nor did they propose a specific set of objectives from which legislation could be derived. Consequently, legislation was developed independently through five different Congressional committees, three in the House and two in the Senate. This resulted in a large amount of contradictory information and a great deal of confusion among our public.”
He’s far from the only one to make this criticism. But it’s a pretty public rebuke in this context. Read More
It seems like a foregone conclusion now. But tonight is the first of six votes between now and Christmas eve that the senate needs to actually get its bill passed. Sometime in the next half hour or so, the senate will the first of three cloture votes over the next few days. This is when they’ll find out whether they really have their sixty votes. We’re covering it all live over at TPMCafe.
1:10 AM: Voting on the first of three cloture votes over coming days just got underway.
1:13 AM: Lieberman, Aye, Lincoln, Aye
1:14 AM: Nelson of Nebraska, Aye
1:15 AM: Snowe, No
1:18 AM: Dems succeed on first of three cloture votes: 60-40.
For reasons tied to the murky parliamentary logic of the senate, this is the first of six votes. But the tick tock over from now to Thursday are basically just what the maximum delay Republicans can force under senate rules. That was the sixty votes the Dems needed. Let’s be clear: this makes passage of the senate bill all but certain.
TPM’s Brian Beutler is at the Capitol as I write getting comment from senators on the historic vote. We’ll have more shortly.
Sometimes you need more than C-Span.
Our Brian Beutler was at the Capitol for the early morning vote, and captured the scene as relieved Democrats stuck together to move health care forward.
Vicki Kennedy was there to embrace her late husband’s former colleagues, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius shouted her congratulations to key senators. Read his piece here.
As we’ve been reporting, the wee hours vote clears a big hurdle meaning they are all-but-certain to pass the bill in a final vote Christmas Eve.
We’ll have more reaction and all the day’s latest on our health care wire and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter.
If you were snowed in or otherwise distracted from all the health care reform goings on over the weekend in the Senate, we’ve got a quick review for you on how it all came down — and on what comes next.
Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) declares that the Senate’s reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body “has been destroyed with what has occurred here the past few days.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Over the weekend I asked whether there wasn’t some way to speed up the implementation of the reforms once they’re enacted. From a political and policy perspective, this is actually the thing that worries me most — the fact that a lot of the reforms won’t go into effect for five years. A lot of it, it turns out, isn’t just because big reforms take a long time to enact but largely because the delay is helping keep the cost down within the president’s promise of a deficit neutral bill. That strikes me as a potentially disastrous tradeoff since that will leave Dems running in 2010 and 2012 on reform legislation that hardly anyone’s got any benefit from.
In our on-going health care discussion at TPMCafe, Paul Starr suggests some ways to rectify the problem.
Con-man convinced Bush White House he had a secret decoding technology which could unearth the secret terrorist planning messages embedded in Al Jazeera broadcasts. They even used it as the basis of a terror warning in 2003.