GOP Strategy to Defeat Health Care

The Plum Line   Greg Sargent's blog

GOP Strategy: Bleed Reconciliation Fix To Death With Byrd Rule

Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.
Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.
At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.
At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix.
That would force the House to vote on it again and again, stalling the process further.
“The bottom line is that it is incredibly difficult to craft a reconciliation bill on health care that isn’t subject to multiple Byrd rule violations,” says one senior Senate GOP aide, who was granted anonymity to preview their strategy. “House Dems are likely to be voting on a reconciliation bill multiple times.”
There’s a larger game plan here. By making it clear they will do their best to tie reconciliation in procedural knots, Republicans are hoping to frighten House Dems into believing reconciliation is doomed. If House Dems are persuaded that the fix later will fail, they will be less likely to pass the original Senate bill in the first place, perhaps killing it.
So that’s the GOP game plan. This stuff is enormously complex, and I’m hoping to get more from experts on how likely it is to succeed. Will keep you posted.
These are two of the comments posted for the article above.

No matter what your political persuasion is, I think we can all agree on the following points:
1. Our deficit is too high
2. Government is inherently corrupt
3. Governments tend to spend and cannot stop spending
4. Government health care reform is not sustainable, i.e. Medicare
5. Some government oversight is needed for the good of society
6. When you have more government, you have less private involvement in anything
To summarize, you cannot live with government and you cannot live without government. The question is how much of government do you want? How much government involvement do you want in healthcare?
Like almost all cost benefit ratios, it is a good rule of thumb to have less of the inefficient factor in the equation. My personal preferrence would be a 80/20 rule. 80% private sector and 20% government. This would be a good rule to measure healthcare reform. If applied to the current reform measure in Congress, we all know that it fails to muster simply on the cost estimates alone, which I think is way too low.
If you want to opinionate on moral grounds, I can give a good point too.


Scott C and QB think they can NEVER be wrong.
They just don’t think it is possible.
They think that everything they say is correct. Not just some things. EVERYTHING.
Even if the facts disagree with them, they think that it’s YOU who is wrong, not them. You can show them links, show them quotations, show them data, doesn’t matter.
In fact, they think that it’s not only YOU who is wrong, but that you don’t have any grasp on reality and that you have no capability for rational thought.
That’s my takeaway from Scott C and QB after months of argument. They think they are always right on every single issue and you are always wrong regardless of your argument and regardless of the facts.
Ya know WHY they act this way?
Because THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT BEING LIARS.
THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT AMERICA.
THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE DEBT OR THE DEFICIT.
THEY DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT THEIR OWN IDEOLOGY.
THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT THEMSELVES, POLITICAL POWER AND MONEY.
AND THEY DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS THIS.


Tally Sheet: Where House Dems Stand On How To Move Health Care Reform Forward

Eric Kleefeld and Evan McMorris-Santoro | January 21, 2010, 5:33PM

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., House Education Chairman George Miller, D-Calif., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., House Transportation Chairman James L. Oberstar, D-Minn., and House Appropriations Chairman David R. Obey, D-Wis., during a news conference.

As the post-Scott Brown phase of the health care debate unfolds, TPMDC is keeping score of where House members stand on the various proposals to move reform forward. Using reader emails as a starting point and confirming them with outside press accounts and our own reporting from Capitol Hill, we're keeping up with Democratic Representatives as they sort out how -- and if -- the reform process gets back on track after the loss of the Democratic supermajority in the House.
The choices facing Representatives break down like this so far: A member can choose to vote for the Senate bill as it exists today, vote for the Senate bill with the promise that the Senate will use reconciliation to make immediate changes to it, split up both bills into smaller single-reform bills and hope there's bipartisan support for them, scrap both bills and start over, or walk away from the process entirely.
Most of these options are new, and members are still making sense of them. Below is our confirmed list of where Representatives stand right now -- check back often for updates as we receive them.

Pass the Senate bill: (1)
Abercrombie, Neil (HI)

Pass the Senate bill with separate amending bill: (12)
Capps, Lois (CA), Clyburn, James (SC), Dingell, John (MI), Frank, Barney (MA), Grayson, Alan (FL), Holt, Rush (NJ), Hoyer, Steny (MD), Kennedy, Patrick (RI), Pelosi, Nancy (CA), Sestak, Joe (PA), Van Hollen, Chris (MD), Watson, Diane (CA)

Pass a bunch of small bills: (9)
Arcuri, Michael (NY), Blumenauer, Earl (OR), Delahunt, Bill (MA), Grijalva, Raul (AZ), McDermott, Jim (WA), Pascrell, Bill (NJ), Tanner, John (TN), Woolsey, Lynn (CA), Yarmuth, John (KY)

Start over: (2)
Weiner, Anthony (NY), McCarthy, Carolyn (NY)

Noncommittal: (28)
Andrews, Robert E. (NJ), Becerra, Xavier (CA), Bishop, Tim (NY), Brady, Robert (PA), Capuano, Mike (MA), Cooper, Jim (TN), Davis, Susan (CA), DeGette, Diana (CO), DeLauro, Rosa (CT), Ellison, Keith (MN), Garamendi, John (CA), Hill, Baron (IN), Hodes, Paul (NH), Kind, Ron (WI), Lee, Barbara (CA), Lujan, Ben (NM) Maloney, Carolyn (NY), McDermott, Jim, (WA), Moran, Jim (VA), Neal, Richard (MA), Pallone, Frank (NJ), Pomeroy, Earl (ND), Rush, Bobby (IL), Schakowsky, Jan (IL), Speier, Jackie (CA), Stark, Pete (CA), Walz, Tim (MN), Waters, Maxine (CA)

Unknown:
Everyone else.