Buck up, everyone. Here’s a post from NR’s Corner less than 2 hours ago:
Dreier: Democrats ‘About 10 Votes Off’ from Passage in House [Daniel Foster]
In a press conference on Capitol Hill today, Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.), ranking Republican on the House Rules Committee, said the word around the House is that Democrats are still about 10 votes away from securing the 216 they will need to pass changes to the health-care bill. Dreier added that that number might be moving in the wrong direction for Democrats.
“You are hearing that people are peeling off,” he said.
Dreier also repeated the warnings about the Senate that many Congressional Republicans have been issuing to the other side of the aisle. He said that, assuming House Democrats succeed in passing a reconciliation measure along to the Senate, even marginal changes made there would require the measure to return to the House yet again.
“I would not be terribly sanguine about the prospect of the Senate effectively dealing with this,” Dreier said, adding that only once in history has a reconciliation measure passed through the Senate without a single amendment.
The reconciliation measure would also have to be sent back to the House if any provisions contained therein were struck down by the Byrd Rule. A memo from Dreier’s office put it this way:
The one thing that history demonstrates is that the reconciliation process in the Senate is unpredictable. No matter how well you “scrub” the provisions in a bill for potential Byrd rule violations, something always gets through. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 had 3 provisions which were stricken on Byrd rule points of order despite a thorough review. The notion that the reconciliation bill will be immediately cleared by the Senate for the President is difficult to fathom.
Dreier said that Republicans won’t know until later this week whether the Democrats will pursue a form of what has come to be known as the “Slaughter Solution” to avoid a direct vote on the Senate bill. But in the memo, Dreier’s office gives three “flavors” such a rule could take. It could simply self-enact the Senate bill and send it to the president to sign. It could deem the Senate bill passed upon passage of the reconciliation measure in the House. Or, in the most unprecedented option, it could deem the Senate bill passed in the House only when the Senate passes the House reconciliation measure.
UPDATE: As several readers noted, the first draft of this post was unclear on whether the whip count was moving toward or away from passage. To clarify, Dreier suggested that the Democrats could be losing votes.
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Good news, thank you.
Today I've called my Representative (Allyson Schwartz). She's a hopeless lefty, but I have to call from time to time to let her staff know I that I'm paying attention, and that I look forward to supporting her electoral opponent. (Her phone lines didn't appear to be busy).
I've also called Congressmen Stupak (MI), Altmire (PA) and Gordon (TN). All the staffers were very cordial and although the phones were busy, I got through. The woman in Cookeville TN told me they'd been hearing from all over the nation and welcomed my comments even though I told her I was from PA, with only family roots in her district. Congressman Altmire's phones were very busy, but I got through to one of the PA offices after 2 or 3 tries. I made sure I played up my connections with each of the districts in hopes they'd give a passing thought to my call.
Making a call doesn't seem like much, but I always think about my friend who used to work as a director of constituent services for one of our PA senators. She told me that every call was recorded on a tally sheet of pro/con positions on key issues. The numbers were communicated to DC daily or even more often in order to gauge public sentiment. She's always encouraged me to call, call, call, so I do, do, do!
What we don’t know is how many Democrats, if any, that Pelosi had in reserve back when they passed the original House bill. I suspect that several conservative Dems were ‘let out’ of the vote in the interests of preserving their seats. Bet that won’t happen this time around.
They may be short on votes — probably are — but it might be far less than the 10 votes stated in NRO.
If the house passes the senate bill but reconciliation fails in the senate, the Dems lose the battle and win the war.