Why reconcilliation would never have worked and the Public Option was always impossible?

[zaj]

I just connected two story lines.

1) The discussion here and on KO of the options (including reconciliation) if we have only 59 votes.
2) Lawrence O'Donnell's HuffPo article on "the Republicans' not-so-secret plan to pass HCR".

KO and many on DU suggest that reconciliation could have been used and should be considered if we end up with 59. I've heard it said again and again that the Senate should have used reconciliation as well.

LarryO says quite flatly that the Republicans have a "not-so-secret plan to pass health care reform". Yes, pass it.

And if he's correct, then reconciliation was *never* an option either... even if technically it could in theory have been used to get the structure needed for a public option (and I get the impression that it was a non-starter, but that's beside this point).

According to Larry:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/will-scott-brown-ruin-rep_b_426604.html

It is now a given that if he wins a Massachusetts Senate seat on Tuesday, Scott Brown will destroy the Democrats' plan to pass health care reform. But he will also destroy the Republicans' not-so-secret plan to pass health care reform.

In Washington, where everyone is desperate to know what's happening behind closed doors, all you have to do to keep something secret is do it out in the open, preferably on C-Span. Mitch McConnell did exactly that when he entered a unanimous consent agreement with Harry Reid about how to proceed on the health care bill. McConnell knew that agreement was going to make it impossible for Republicans to amend the bill and would put it on a fast track toward passage.

McConnell accepted an agreement brilliantly designed by Reid that required 60 votes to pass an amendment. McConnell did that without anyone noticing anything odd after a year of saturation coverage of the importance of 60 votes in the Senate. Everyone outside the Senate now thinks it takes 60 votes to do anything. Not amendments. Amendments pass by a simple majority, 51 votes. Amendments are usually debated for a couple of minutes or hours or days, then voted on. Once in a while, a 60-vote cloture motion is needed to end debate on an amendment. What McConnell agreed to was an implicit cloture motion in every vote on every amendment, thereby completely surrendering the minority's real power. In all my years in the Senate, I never saw a leader make such a mistake. If it was a mistake.

There are no real filibusters in the Senate anymore. The way you "filibuster" a bill that you want to kill is offer an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments that have to be debated and voted on. It's easy to come up with one amendment per page of legislation. That's why the Republicans offered hundreds of amendments during the Senate committees' debates on the bill. When the majority leader brings up a two thousand page bill, the minority would normally come up with at least five hundred amendments that could drag out the debate for several months. That's what the Republicans did in 1994 when they killed the Clinton health care reform bill on the Senate floor. No filibuster, no forcing the Democrats to clear 60-vote procedural hurdles, no forcing a reading to the bill, just an endless stream of reasonable sounding amendments -- so reasonable that some of them passed with votes of 100 to 0. And the Democrats, seeing this could go on forever, surrendered. Fifty-seven Democrats were defeated by forty-three determined Republicans. <...>

There are no columnists or pundits who understand Senate parliamentary procedure. There are actually very few senators who do. McConnell knows that. He knew everyone would fall for the silly stunts that looked obstructionist while he was surrendering all his power to Reid.

If Larry is right, and I trust he is, then it appears that the Senate Dems and GOP (and likely Obama) had an agreement that permitted passage of a HCR bill while letting the GOP look "obstructionist".

The deal was that Dems agree to hold to 60 votes, Reps agree to allow the bill to pass with 60 votes.

They could kill it if they wanted, ala 1994. They didn't want to.

When combined with the knowledge that Joe Lieberman was *never* going to vote for a public option and thus the Dems *never* had the votes needed to pass it, it's clear that the public option was a technical impossibility.

[TheWraith]

1. The Reps already tried the amendment thing.

They submitted 532 amendments to the original bill.

[zaj]

3. Reread it. They 500+ amendments is *not* "endless" amendments.

I didn't realize that the 94 bill was killed not by cloture, but by a strategy of endless amendments.

Interesting history.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Uh, in that case why doesn't Mr. Brilliant just go find a moderate republican to vote yes?

[zaj]

4. The GOP has a political strategy of obstruction.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

6. That doesn't make any sense.

Do they want it to pass or not? If they want it to pass, I'm sure they could find a lone republican somewhere in the Senate who would vote yes.

[zaj]

9. They were willing to let it pass under certain circumstances, namely no-public option...

... I don't see how it makes no sense.

They were willing to let it pass as long as there was no public option. They worked out a strategy with Reid/Obama to agree to 60 votes, which would preclude a 1994 like death-by-2000-amendments but would also preclude reconciliation.

And without Joe Lieberman or a replacement Republican, that meant no public option.

So that means they get a healthcare proposal out of the Dems that they can live with, but they can use their opposition to it as their campaign focus, and rally their base (as they have effectively it seems).

It makes perfect sense.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

10. That is not what the article says.

The article says they have a seeeekrit evil plan to make sure it passes. So either the Republicans are the worst seeekrit planners of all time, or this is total rubbish. Because if it doesn't pass, their seeekrit plan is worthless garbage.

[zaj]

11. The premise of his article isn't my point...

... as I stated in my opening post, I'm connecting the dots of two critical factors.

1) The promise of reconciliation
2) The reality that cloture wasn't what killed the 1994 bill, it was endless amendments

And how all of the puzzle fits perfectly together with this critical detail thank to LO.

In fact, his article seems to be among the more important articles I've read since the healthcare debate started.

[FrenchieCat]

19. I thought the 1994 Health Care bill never made it out of committee?

August 25, 1994 - Democratic leaders of both congressional chambers give up on health care and announce they are letting their members go home for their much-postponed vacation. Neither the Senate (where Democrats outnumber Republicans fifty-six to forty-four) nor the House (with a Democratic majority of 257 to 176) has come close to passing, or even voting on, any health bill.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/may96/background/health_debate_page3.html

[zaj]

5. This acutally makes HCR sound a lot like the legalized abortion issue for the GOP...

... something they can accept and even embrace, largely because they want to campaign against it more than defeat it.

[Ozymanithrax]

7. If they wanted to pass it, they could have voted for the bill...

Hell, they could have simply refused to insist on nearly a dozen procedural votes where 60 votes were needed to overcome Republican obstructionism. Republicans made the call for "an up or down vote" famous during their tenure as a majority. While the majority party, they could have reformed health care themselves.

Lawrence O'Donnell's HuffPo article sounds like "super secret probation" with the Republcans being those loveable assholes in "Animal House."

[zaj]

8. LO is saying that they weren't going to vote *for* it, but they were allowing it, unlike 1994

... I never really understood the process behind the voting in 1994. But as he explains it, the GOP allowed a non public option version of the bill to go forward.

This seems to explain just about *everything* that might piss off a progressive Dem.

It seems like something *critically* important to understand one way or the other.

[zaj]

12. Bump for morning folks

This is something I think people need to discuss.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

13. I absolutely believe that the Repubs want HCR to pass so they have it as a club

to beat Democrats with in the next General election. Since they were never going to vote for anything anyway, the Dems could have constructed anything they wanted. They watered down and watered down and watered down to get Snowe and Lieberman who didn't budge anyway. So they watered down and got a crappy bill that will make an even stouter club to bash them with in 2010.

Once it became clear that they were being bi-partisan all by themselves, they should have withdrawn and crafted a far better and stronger bill. If you're going to get hit over the head with your own legislation, at least make it good enough to withstand some scrutiny! The Dems caved on almost every single thing they said they stood for. They ARE taxing the middle class, they are forcing private for profit insurance down people's throats without a public option as a choice, they haven't removed the most egregious problems of anti-trust, rescission, prior conditions, age bias, affordability, caps, drug negotiation, generics left out in cold, etc. etc. etc.

They will go down in 2010 because they devised the crappiest bill imaginable all by themselves.

I think the Republicans want the bill to pass so much that they will authorize someone to cross the aisle to make it happen if Coakley loses - it will probably be Snowe at the last minute or some Repub who is going to retire or lose anyway.

So I agree the Republicans want it to pass, I disagree that a better bill with a public option was undoable.

[zaj]

14. Joe "Hartford" Lieberman says you are wrong.

The Senate agreed to 60 votes in trade for the GOP not amending the bill to death like they did in 1994. And Joe Lieberman was sitting there waiting to kill any bill with a public option.

The two strategies combine to make the Public Option a non-starter. And that explains why Obama never committed to vetoing a bill without the public option. They never had the votes for it and couldn't use reconciliation.

[flamingdem]

18. ohhhh nt

[zaj]

15. Given the discussion I'm seeing tonight, this seems even more relevant...

bump.

[LeftyAndProud60]

16. Wow, this is disturbing. NT

[Clio the Leo]

17. And WHERE on the grassy knoll would Mitch McConnel stand?

.... is it a Grassley knoll? :)

[zaj]

20. Pointing out that the GOP didn't do in 2009 what they did in 1993 is hardly...

... tinfoil hat talk.

It's incredibly simple actually.

Why would the GOP not follow exactly the same successful strategy to kill healthcare in 2009 that they used in 1993?