Ezra Klein:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/nancy_pelosis_strategy_for_pas.html">Nancy Pelosi's strategy for passing health-care reform
Democrats have been on the verge of passing health-care reform for many months now, but for all the doors they've kicked in, they've found more doors waiting on the other side. But today, Pelosi made her clearest statements yet on how she means to finish this bill. The issue is how to sequence the Senate health bill, which the House doesn't like, with the package of fixes (including, Pelosi said, the elimination of the Nebraska and Florida deals, the delay of the excise tax, more affordability and oversight provisions and more funding of community health centers), which the House does like. There are a number of procedural options on the table, but today, Pelosi said that she favors the “deem and pass” strategy.
Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after the House passes the fixes.
The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill. They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed, even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never specifically voted on the Senate bill.
...."The bill is locked down," Pelosi says. "We're just waiting for the Congressional Budget Office." When the bill emerges, Democrats will be able to say "definitively" what is in it. And then, Pelosi believes, her caucus will see that this is "the most important bill most of us will ever pass," that it is legislation on par "with Social Security and Medicare." The bottom line, Pelosi says, is that "I have faith in my members." In a couple of days, we'll see if that faith is well-founded.
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Edited to add: it's great to see all the stops finally being pulled out when even as recently as last month, you couldn't even get Pelosi or Reid to say the word "reconciliation" without them vitually disavowing it!
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