Democrats are right to lock Republicans out of health reform conference committee

Normally, I'd be in favor of following protocol involving conference committees. President Obama was elected on a promise to make Washington a more civil place, and it is absolutely certain that Democrats will therefore receive some flak for bypassing the conference committee and excluding Republicans from the final negotiation on health care.

WASHINGTON – House and Senate Democrats intend to bypass traditional procedures when they negotiate a final compromise on health care legislation, officials said Monday, a move that will exclude Republican lawmakers and reduce their ability to delay or force politically troubling votes in both houses....

Democratic aides said the final compromise talks would essentially be a three-way negotiation involving top Democrats in the House and Senate and the White House, a structure that gives unusual latitude to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.

These officials said there are no plans to appoint a formal House-Senate conference committee, the method Congress most often uses to reconcile differing bills. Under that customary format, a committee chairman is appointed to preside, and other senior lawmakers from both parties and houses participate in typically perfunctory public meetings while the meaningful negotiations occur behind closed doors.

In this case though the White House, Reid and Pelosi are absolutely right. If there was a chance of reaching a consensus that Republicans could support then they should work with Republicans. But since it is now abundantly clear that the GOP is fixated on a single goal-- to defeat the bill-- there is no point in watering it down even further than it already has been in exchange for exactly nothing, because that's how much support any compromise with Republicans would get from the right side of the aisle.

Consider last year's stimulus bill early in the Obama administration when we were literally teetering on the brink of a total financial collapse and a second Great Depression. President Obama broke precedent by traveling to Capitol Hill to meet with Congress, including several meetings with Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate. Democrats made numerous changes in the bill to accomodate Republicans. We ended up with a watered-down stimulus (one reason economists are now saying we should pass another one this year) that was 43% tax cuts (including several breaks that Republicans specifically asked be included) and money that was supposed to be spent on needed school construction and renovation (and which would certainly have created jobs and boosted the local economy everywhere) was axed to keep Republicans happy. The price for the vote of Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) was to get rid of funding for pandemic preparedness.

So after reaching out to Republicans and making all of these concessions, how many Republicans actually voted for the bill? Zero in the House and three in the Senate.

When the health care reform bill was in committee, the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee entertained and ultimately accepted over 200 amendments proposed by Republicans. But even with the amendments in the bill, every single Republican voted against it. Then Senator Max Baucus spent the summer meeting with three Republican Senators to try and craft a bipartisan bill. He at least did get one Republican on his committee to vote for the final committee bill-- Maine's Olympia Snowe. But in the process all of the compromises that were written into his committee's bill-- most notably the lack of a public option-- were supported by Republicans but in the end they voted against the finished product.

So then during the floor debate in the House and especially in the Senate we saw Republicans do everything they could, not to reach an accord on the bill, but simply to delay the bill. And in the end, stripped of a public option and with abortion language that undermines the stated promise to end gender discrimination in pricing in order to placate Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson, the bill passed with one Republican vote in the house and none in the Senate.

It is now abundantly clear that rather than trying to help craft a health reform bill that is more to their liking, Republicans, who would need to prevent Democrats in the Senate from reaching sixty votes on the final passage of the conference committee bill have instead bet the farm on making it fail. Their best hope is to try and delay the bill until some Democrat breaks ranks, or maybe they are hoping that Robert Byrd has a heart attack next month, or heck who knows what they are hoping, anything to make it fail.

Under these circumstances there is no reason at all to talk to Republicans. They will vote against it anyway and their entire agenda is delay, not serious negotiation. You'd have a better chance of trying to convince the chief Ayatollah of Iran to become a Mormon.

House health care reform bill passes

Today the house passed an historic health care reform bill.

The roll-call vote is right here.

The debate was fluid during the day. At one point Bart Stupak (D-MI) pushed through an amendment that will ban a public option from paying for abortions. This is clearly an anti-choice amendment (after all private insurance companies routinely cover abortion) but it also had the effect of forcing Stupak and several other anti-choice Democrats to support the bill once the amendment was included and counting the votes at that moment Pelosi pounced and pushed for a vote on the whole bill.

The vote was 220-215 in favor of the bill. However, as Lyndon Johnson once said he liked winning with small margins because then he knew he'd gotten everything out of it that he could. Pelosi got the votes of 219 Democrats, one more than she needed, and an unexpected gift-- one Republican who braved the wrath of John Boehner and voted for the bill (Anh Cao, R-LA, who represents an overwhelmingly Democratic district and got elected at all last year mainly because his opponent was corrupt congressman Willie 'cold cash' Jefferson.) After voting with the party line on the stimulus as Boehner tried to prevent any display at all of bipartisanship, apparently being asked to go against the wishes of his constituents again was too much for Cao.

I'm not thrilled with the Stupak amendment, but strategically it makes sense-- given the closeness of the vote it is entirely possible that the whole vote could have failed without Stupak and his compatriots. And as the debate moves forward to the much tougher Senate phase at least the Stupak amendment cuts off one line of attack for the right.

However, all in all, this is a good day.

Phony attack on Speaker Pelosi should be confronted

There are times when attacks by the Republican attack machine have their basis in reality, when some Democrat did something (s)he should not have done and the attack dogs sense blood in the water and go after it like ravenous sharks. Well, I guess I can't complain too much when that happens because I've been urging Democrats for years to play hardball politics the same way, and lately we've been a lot better at it. When that happens then you can blame the attack dogs, but you also have to blame the idiot that got caught with his or her pants down (whether figuratively or literally).

But there are also times when the attacks have no basis in reality, and are contrived and patched together as an attempt to invent a scandal and go after someone just so they can paint something on that person no matter how phony the attack is.

And so it is today that I am posting in defense of Speaker Pelosi. I might add that I've known who Nancy Pelosi was and known the Speaker to be a defender of human rights for many years before others even heard of her. Many years ago I signed an online petition on behalf of a Chinese dissident. About a year or two after that I and about fifty or a hundred other people who did not know each other received a series of mysterious emails from someone named, 'runner' tied to the approaching tenth anniversary of Tianenmen Square. Pelosi was one of those, as her congressional email address stuck out like a sore thumb in the list of apparently unrelated emails. Someone finally figured out that what drew us together was that we had all signed the same petition. Needless to say since then I've known who Nancy Pelosi is and I'm proud to stand with her in support of human rights.

The right is jumping all over a story that says that the Speaker (then minority leader) was briefed on waterboarding in 2002 and again in 2003 and did not object to it.

That is false however.

To begin with, at the time of the 2002 briefing on interrogation tactics waterboarding had been used on one Al-Qaeda prisoner and Pelosi and others were told specifically that it HAD NOT AND WOULD NOT be used. That's not just Pelosi's recollection , as she pointed out in remarks made yesterday but also the recollection of former Florida Senator Bob Graham who was also at the meeting. As for the 2003 briefing Pelosi pointed out that she was not present to raise an objection when others were told that it had been used as a tactic. The record bears that out:

Despite Boehner's comments, CIA records show Pelosi attended only one briefing — the one in the fall of 2002 where she says she was told that waterboarding had not been used. A chart released by the CIA detailing its briefings for lawmakers is vague on what transpired at that session. It says Pelosi and the top Intelligence Committee Republican, then-Rep. Porter J. Goss of Florida, were given a "description of the particular (enhanced interrogation techniques) that had been employed," without further details.

Remember that she claims (as does at least one other person who was present at the briefing) that she was told that waterboarding was not used at all in 2002. If the Speaker can be faulted at all it might be for not attending every single briefing but the truth is that Congress is a very busy place (especially for its leaders) so missing a briefing is hardly unusual.

More to the point though is the implication that because the Speaker never raised an objection (even if she had been there to raise one) that means she supported or at least condoned the tactic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nancy Pelosi has consistently demanded that our intelligence officers comply with universally accepted (and agreed to by treaty) standards on the treatment of prisoners. She has never, repeat never accepted, condoned or failed to speak out against waterboarding or any other form of torture when she was given an opportunity to do so.

The purpose of this attack on the Speaker is to try and create, after the fact, some kind of defense for the indefensible. Now that it is time to really find out who authorized what and who told who what and when, the guilty parties are trying to smear their guilt around and all over those who have always been outspoken against what they are doing. Bending and twisting the facts or creating new ones are a desperate play by the right and it is important for those of us who want to see Congress get to the bottom of this to stand up now and defend the Speaker against these scurrilous attacks.

As I said at the outset, there are the attacks that seed themselves, by someone leaving a door open for the wolves. And then there are the attacks that are purely manufactured and this is one of those.