Morning Bell: Government-Run Health Care by Next Thursday? » The Foundry
Folks, if you think we aren’t going to get ObamaCare Socialized Medicine, complete with the Public Option private enterprise killer and, probably, mandates and rationing as well, you probably don’t understand how the Senate really works.
Here’s the critical info:
But what about Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ (D-MT) claim yesterday that, “No one has been able to show me how we can count up to 60 votes with a public option.” That may be true, but it is also irrelevant. The question is not whether Democrats can muster 60 votes to pass Obamacare; they only need 51 votes to do that. The only time the number 60 will be relevant is when the Senate votes on whether to end debate and vote on the final bill. This is a separate question. We can see Senators from red states like Ben Nelson (D-NE), Blanch Lincoln (D-AR), and Kent Conrad (D-ND) voting against an amendment creating a public option. But voting with Republicans against their party and against their President to support a Republican filibuster? That would take a lot of courage. It would guarantee that these Democrats would face fierce opposition from their leftist bases back home.
This seems accurate to me. For a great many years, courage has been a quality in short supply on both sides of the aisle.
The wishy-washers will vote against ObamaCare, but will vote to break the filibuster that allows it to become law. They will then say, with a straight face and perfect accuracy, “We never voted for the Obama Health Care Plan.”
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
I’d been meaning to look up the Senate rules that allow the filibuster, but I’ve never gotten around to it. It would make more sense if the rules were rewritten so that bills simply required 3/5ths to pass, and filibusters stopped being a consideration.
Change the requirement for passage of a bill would require a Constitutional amendment, with all the foofawraw that that entails. Change the rule requiring that cloture needs 60 votes requires only a two-thirds vote (IIRC) of the Senate.
Actually, I’m fairly certain that that is incorrect. It used to take 67 votes to break a filibuster and I’m pretty sure that the number was moved down to 60 by a purely procedural maneuver; it might have been done by Kennedy. It could just as easily be moved to 50 by nothing more than a Senate rule change via the majority.