Before a piece of legislation can be sent to the House floor for debate and amendments, it must be cleared through the House Rules committee. This is important, because as of this writing, the committee has still not scheduled a markup for H.R. 3962--aka, the health care reform bill.
In fact, according to its website, tomorrow the committee is scheduled to mark-up a different piece of legislation, H.R. 3639, the Expedited CARD Reform for Consumers Act of 2009.
This calls into question reports that the House will be voting on the health care bill as early as Thursday. Given that the Speaker has promised House members 72 hours to read the bill before a vote, and give that Wednesday is now the earliest the Committee on Rules could finish with the health care bill, then the earliest that the House could possibly vote on health care reform is now Saturday.
The holdup is likely due to continued negotiations over what amendments, if any, will be allowed on the floor of the House. These fights include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Representative Stupak (D-MI) is trying to get a vote on an amendment to disallow any health care plans in the new insurance exchange from covering abortion procedures. The Democratic leadership does not want this amendment to come to a vote, because they believe it would pass. Further, if it passes, it would likely kill the entire bill, as numerous pro-choice Representatives would vote against it. Given that the leadership is already struggling to find 218, they afford any further defections.
Since Stupak knows the leadership will never allow such an amendment freely, he is attempting to round-up enough Democrats to vote against the "motion to recommit" on the health care bill unless the amendment is allowed a vote.
- Representative Grijalva (D-AZ) is attempting to get a vote on an amendment to add the Medicare +5% public option back into the bill. For several months, Grijalva had been organizing members of the Progressive Caucus to vote against the health care bill unless it had this form of public option. Now, however, he just seems to be pushing for an amendment, and is not offering direct threats to block the entire bill:
"You know, there's a lot of pressure right now--take one for the team, take one for the administration--and I think that pressure will come to bear, and they'll probably end up with 218. I'm not sure how I'm gonna vote," Grijalva said. "I'm leaning no, and that's a direction--I'm not ready to jump on the bandwagon."
- Representative Weiner (D-NY) is looking to get a vote on an amendment to replace the entire health care reform package with H.R. 676, Medicare for All (aka, single-payer). This was an amendment promised to Representative Weiner in exchange for allowing the health care bill clear the Energy and Commerce committee back in July. Representative Peter Welch (D-VT), claims that single-payer has over 100 supporters at this point.
However, last Thursday, Speaker Pelosi told me that it is not possible to have a piece of legislation voted on unless it was scored by the CBO, and H.R. 676 has not been scored by the CBO. So, it doesn't look like this promise is going to be kept.
Given Grijalva's new tone, Stupak is now the main delay in the legislation. It is important to remember that his coalition to block the bill includes not only anti-choice Democrats, but also the entire Republican House caucus, and a couple dozen Democrats who are opposed to the bill for reasons that have nothing to do with abortion. Stupak appears to be the final hurdle for the leadership to clear, and at this point we can assume any delay is because the leadership has not yet removed his roadblock.
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