Rick Santorum greets possible CPAC straw poll defeat with an icy indifference.
Nothing has been murkier or more opaque than the last month’s worth of discussions over how or even whether to revive the seemingly moribund health care reform effort. But it’s starting to seem like Democrats may actually decide to go ahead with what they could have and should done a month ago — have the House pass the existing senate bill and then pass a companion piece of legislation to ‘fix’ the first bill, which will be pushed through the senate using reconciliation, i.e., 50 vote rules. (One of the funniest parts of this is watching the DC press refer to this as resorting to a “majority-vote procedure.” That’s what it’s come to.)
On a local TV interview show on Friday Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) basically said it’s the plan, that they will use ‘reconciliation’, and that they’ll finish within the next 60 days. Read More
From TPM Reader DO …
Instead of using the term “reconciliation” to describe the process with which HCR will be (hopefully) passed, I think the Democrats should start using the term “Majority Rules”.
Democrats in general do a horrible job of branding their initiatives. If the Republicans had passed the Stimulus bill they would have called it the Jobs bill. Using the term “Majority Rules” puts a favorable spin on the process, plus it educates the public that the Senate usually does not operate in a democratic manner.
Get the key developments in the TPM Sunday Show Roundup
In the month since Scott Brown’s January 19 win in Massachusetts, health care reform has gone from all but dead, to showing a few weak signs of life, to perhaps on the road to a full recovery. Emphasis on perhaps. It all depends on whether Democrats succeed in getting their act together. That starts this morning with the White House unveiling its proposal for reform, the first time President Obama has put his name behind specific policy provisions rather than just broad political principles.
How hobbled will Senate Democrats be by having only 59 members in their caucus? We’ll find out today when Harry Reid tries to get a stripped-down jobs bill past a GOP filibuster. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.
Are they taking a new approach?
From our write-up of the White House’s just released Health Care Reform proposal …
“The president expects and believes the American people deserve an up or down vote on health care reform,” Pfeiffer said, calling the potential of a blockage from Republicans an “extraordinary step of filibustering health care reform.”
Read the whole thing here.
Mike Huckabee, who finished sixth out of 11 candidates in CPAC’s presidential straw poll: CPAC has become just a bunch of Libertarians.
In a little noticed portion of the big torture report released by the DOJ on Friday, an interviewer asked John Yoo whether the president could legally order the massacre of a village of civilians.
Yoo’s answer: Totally.