California Conservative

This Las Vegas Sun article suggests that we won’t see a signing ceremony on health care this year. Here’s why I’m saying that:

No sooner than the Senate Finance Committee’s chairman released his long-awaited health care bill today than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it’s not good enough for Nevada. Reid is concerned about the cash-poor state’s inability to boost Medicaid spending as would be required under the bill.

“While this draft bill is a good starting point, it needs improvement before it will work for Nevada,” Reid said in a statement. “During this time of economic crisis, our state cannot afford to shoulder the second highest increase in Medicaid funding.”

the bill introduced today by Sen. Baucus is fatally flawed, with Sen. Reid being the fourth DEMOCRATIC senator to complain about the bill, joining, Ron Wyden, Bob Casey and Jay Rockefeller in stating opposition to the bill for various reasons.

There’s only 2 weeks left in September. That’s significant because the reconciliation deadline ‘expires’ 2 weeks after that. After that, the bill requires sixty votes in the Senate. That’s before considering the need to pass the spending bills before the fiscal year ends at 11:59:59 Sept. 30, 2009. They either have to pass the 13 spending bills by then or pass a continuing resolution by then.

Assuming that a bill gets passed out of committee by then, which isn’t certain by any stretch of the imagination, then the Senate has to pass a bill and the House has to pass a bill, then iron out the differences before voting on the conference report.

That’s going to be a difficult task because Rep. Bart Stupak, (D-MI), said that he’s got the votes to stop the Democrats’ House bill if they don’t allow his amendment an up or down vote. Stupak’s amendment would prohibit the use of public money being used to pay for abortions. Essentially, it’s the Hyde Amendment of years gone past.

According to this Hill article, Sen. Reid is still playing up the reconciliation storyline:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Tuesday that Democrats are prepared to use budget reconciliation as a last resort.

“We’ve always had a place at the table for Republicans. There’s one there today. We hope it bears fruit,” he said. “If we can’t get the 60 votes we need, then we’ll have no alternative but to use reconciliation.”

That’s wishful thinking on Reid’s part. It isn’t happening, partially because of the things I listed earlier in the article, partially because of the technical hurdles I wrote about here:

[Last night] on Hannity, Speaker Gingrich said that he’s been told that there are so many points of order that would be launched that the resulting legislation would be totally incoherent. If that’s true, and I’ll trust Mr. Newt that it is, then the Democrats’ uphill fight just got infinitely more challenging.

Sen. Reid’s chances of getting anything meaningful accomplished through reconciliation is miniscule at best. That’s because he’ll have to do battle with Sen. Gregg, (R-NH), who is preparing a lengthy list of potential points of order for the reconciliation fight. If it’s a match of wits between Sen. Gregg and anyone in the Democrats’ leadership team, I’ll place my bets on Sen. Gregg.

This doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be a health care bill signing this year but it puts that possibility on life support. That means that people can breath a little bit easier, though only for a little while.

Technorati Tags: Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Jay Rockefeller, Bob Casey, Ron Wyden, Reconciliation, Senate, Democrats, Judd Gregg, Point Of Order, Republicans, Bart Stupak, Hyde Amendment, Abortion, Public Funding, Conference Committee, President Obama

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Debates, Health Care, Liberals, Obama, Pelosi, Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.