Matthew Continetti, writing in The Weekly Standard:
ith the defense appropriations bill set for passage on Saturday, Harry Reid has cleared the way to focus on health care until — and perhaps during — Christmas. But he still doesn’t have 60 votes. Ben Nelson is holding out. So is Bernie Sanders.
Meanwhile, before departing for Copenhagen, President Obama met with Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine. Why? Because Snowe’s vote for cloture would not only provide bipartisan cover; it would also allow Ben Nelson to be the sixty-first, not the sixtieth, vote to end debate. If Nelson is the sixtieth vote to proceed to a final vote on health care reform — a vote the Democrats surely would win — he’d be vulnerable to the attack that he’s the man responsible for Obamacare. Snowe provides a way out. Unfortunately for the White House, after her meeting Snowe said a vote by Christmas was “totally unrealistic.”
In other health care news, as both Bill Kristol and Mary Katherine Ham have noted, David Brooks writes today that he would not vote for the Senate bill in its current form. Expect Brooks to take a shellacking in the liberal blogosphere for his apostasy. But expect, too, that his column will be read with great interest in the offices of moderate Democrats and Republicans.This was not a “helpful” column . . .
No; I do not imagine that it was.
Please pray for Snowe, Nelson and Sanders to hold the line, and call their offices if you’re in their states. We are no longer at the stage of having them vote on a bill they have not read: Reid is asking for a vote on a bill these guys haven’t even seen.
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Just looked over the US Constitution. It turns out that the verbiage therein does not require, not even by implication, that bills be read prior to being voted on.
What’s to stop Reid and Co. from getting the votes they need, and then writing and submitting a completely different bill?
(Aside from the fact that they will only get away with it once–long-term thinking has never been a Congressional strength.)