Bad Buzz on Health Care Reform

The rumblings from the Senate are not good.  It appears that the Nevada Leg Hound, Harry Reid has chosen to ignore the will of 65% of Americans and hump the GOP leg instead.

Surprise!

Democratic aides say that Senate leaders working with the White House to meld the two bills are inclined to leave the public option out and to let supporters propose amendments to add it during floor debate.

Before I go any further, no, that's not actually the main thrust of the article. And the main thrust is really interesting and you should go read it. But it's an important part for my purposes today -- the discussion of how procedure will effect the substantive outcome of this bill.

For those of you who don't recognize this set up, it's a familiar play. The bill comes to the floor with some particular deficiency, and the "deal" is that opponents are to be allowed a vote on an amendment that would correct it. But the catch is that the unanimous consent agreement under which the bill comes to the floor and the terms for debate are set requires a 60 vote threshold to pass that amendment.

Why would anybody agree to such an arrangement? It's meant as a mechanism for bypassing the trouble and delay caused by a threatened filibuster, whether of the bill as a whole or of that particular amendment. Rather than go through the actual annoyance and time-wasting involved in a real filibuster, the leadership chooses to recognize the validity of the threat, and instead of dealing with the annoyance of filing for cloture and waiting a real filibuster out, the parties instead agree that they'll require for passage of the bill or amendment the same 60 votes that would have been necessary for cloture.

This has the advantage of saving everyone some time and trouble without really requiring any more votes to pass the measure than would otherwise have been necessary. But it also has the effect of shielding those who claim they would filibuster from having to stand up and go on record as opposing cloture, not to mention actually conducting the filibuster -- though that, too, has certainly become easier to do these days. That's why I call this the "painless filibuster."… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Daily Kos>

This article goes on to explain the painless filibuster in more depth.  It’s worth the read.

I explained here that putting the public option in the bill would require the Republicans to get 60 votes to remove it, something they cannot do.  Leaving it out of the bill requires the Democrats to get 60 votes to put it in.  Reid is taking the power the voters gave the Democratic Party in November and handing it to the Republicans.  Why on earth would he do that?  The answer seems clear to me.  He’s protecting DINO Democrats like BARF Baucus, enabling them to earn their 30 coins of silver from Big Insurance.  If this article is correct, these DINOs will ne able to join the GOP in filibustering just the public option, saving them from having to chose whether to filibuster the entire health care bill to earn their blood stained campaign contributions.