I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been completely confused as to what has been going on in Washington D.C. regarding the health care legislation. At some point I lost track of who was voting for what, and what had passed and what had not.
So, I turned to my “official (and anonymous) Capitol Hill correspondent” and asked, basically, for a summation of what had happened. I think it will help in understanding what has been going on these past months.
“Tell me, in 40 words or less, what just happened,” I said in an email, saying that maybe I was stupid but I couldn’t keep track.
The response was a little more than 40 words or less, but well worth it:
You’re not stupid. This legislative process is about the most appalling since…well, since the Republicans were in charge.
The “health care bill” proper has passed. It’s ugly and gimmick-filled–it includes sweeteners for Nebraska and Florida and other side deals thrown in by the Senate to get individual senators to support the thing.
The bill first passed the House in July. The Senate changed it substantially and passed it in December. It was supposed to be dead on arrival when it came back to the House for consideration. No one figured the House would let all of those side deals pass. Then Scott Brown was elected to take Ted Kennedy’s spot in the 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88–er, I mean his spot in the United States Senate, at which point the Dems went from 60 seats to 59 and lost their supermajority threshold. So the House Dems decided to just pass the Senate bill so that it could go straight to the President. If the House had changed the bill at all, it would have gone back to the Senate, where we now have enough Republicans (41) to filibuster.
At the same time, the House Dems put together a separate bill (the “reconciliation bill”) to take out all of those side deals and correct everything they didn’t like about the Senate-passed bill. The beauty of doing a reconciliation bill is that the Senate can pass it with just 51 votes–it doesn’t need 60. The reconciliation process was designed as an end-of-year-type thing: ”We passed all sorts of bills this year that spend money, so now we need to pass a catch-all bill that adjusts spending levels to make sure all of this spending fits under the budget we passed at the very beginning.” Because reconciliation was considered such an important thing to do (back in the day when we pretended we were paying the bills rather than deficit-spend), the Senate rules don’t allow it to be filibustered.
So the reconciliation bill could pass the Senate this week. And the health care bill itself will be signed into law Tuesday in a big ceremony that has led to the cancellation of White House tours, including those scheduled for school groups. So a lot of little kids will be crying tonight, both about not being able to take the tour and because trillions of dollars have been added to their debt burden.
So there you go.
You can read the bill, and more, here.
