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Anonymous
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You gotta love politics :wink: I wonder how loud the Republicans will scream if now the Dems use the reconciliation process :???:
What goes around- comes around :wink:
What goes around- comes around :wink:
Plan B for Health Care Reform
Now that two of the three Republicans Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) picked to negotiate with over health care (Sen. Michael Enzi and Sen. Chuck Grassley) have basically said they don't want reform and are just trying to kill what they consider a bad bill, Democrats are looking at other options. One obvious one is to try to find a couple of other Republicans to negotiate with, but there are not likely to be many takers.
Then what? Using the reconciliation process is getting more attention, as it requires only 50 votes plus Joe Biden and cannot be filibustered. TPM has an interesting story on this option. In short, only bills with a major impact on the federal budget are allowed in reconciliation. So to qualify easily, the bill would need a robust public option that puts a lot of pressure on insurance companies and would lower health care costs. Liberals could go for that. The trouble is that conservative Democratic senators, such as Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA), might bolt. If more than 10 Democrats and independents refused to sign on, the bill wouldn't get the necessary 50 votes. But if the public option were weakened to get enough votes, it might not qualify for reconciliation.
There are ways to deal with this problem, however. First, "qualification" means that the Senate parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, says that the bill qualifies. But if a majority of the Senate doesn't agree with him, the Senate can overrule him. In fact, it can also fire him. This is precisely what happened in 2001, when the Republican-controlled Senate didn't like the rulings from then-parliamentarian Robert Dove on Bush's tax cuts, so they fired him and hired Frumin.
A second (theoretical) option is for President Obama to strongarm a couple of recalcitrant senators to get to 50. He could start by reading a couple of biographies of Lyndon Johnson. Then he could look for trade barriers, subsidies, and tax breaks their states depend on, etc. As one example, he could invite Landrieu to the White House to discuss global warming. Since Hurricane Katrina, she has become somewhat interested in the topic. He could say that he wants to encourage the use of ethanol as a fuel and by far the most efficient way to make it is from sugar, which can be purchased at considerable expense in Louisiana or very cheaply in Brazil. Consequently, he wants to abolish all barriers to importing unlimited amounts of Brazilian sugar. If this means the end of the Louisiana sugar industry, so be it. At that point he would have her 100% undivided attention and could add "but if you were to vote for the health bill, as a special favor to you, I could shelve this plan." Ben Nelson might get a lecture on the need for reducing the federal deficit--a topic of great interest to him--starting with eliminating those wasteful subsidies to Nebraska corn farmers. And so on. The problem with this approach is that Obama is no LBJ. He'd have to learn fast and it is not really his style.