Thune: GOP preparing to slow or block health bill in Senate debate

Republicans are preparing to raise points of order and other roadblocks to the healthcare bill, a member of the Senate GOP leadership said Tuesday evening.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the fourth-ranking Senate Republican who serves as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, said the GOP is prepared for a number of scenarios in which they would seek to slow down or halt passage of healthcare legislation once it comes back before the Senate.

"I still think it creates a lot of problems when it comes back to the Senate because there will be lots of points of order that will lie against the bill in the Senate, and obviously, we will, hopefully, have the opportunity to raise some of those," Thune said of the health bill during an appearance on Fox News.

At issue is the new bill of healthcare legislation changes the House is expected to pass under budget reconciliation rules. Under those rules, the legislation only has to achieve a simple majority in the Senate instead of the 60 normally needed to end a filibuster. Such a maneuver would effectively sidestep Republican opposition to the health bill.

"You know, I don't want to concede that it's going to pass for sure yet," Thune said. "I still think that there's a lot of clock left in this game."

Republicans have fewer procedural options under reconciliation rules, which limits debate and is designed to eventually force votes on a piece of legislation. The GOP might object, though, for instance, to whether the new legislation is germane to the budget. These points are decided by the Senate parliamentarian, but could be overruled by the president of the Senate.

"I think we have to be prepared for all types of different scenarios and sort of game this out," Thune explained. "I mean, our goal at the end is to stop a really bad bill from passing."

"So my guess is, before this is all said and done, that if they want to pass it, they may be able to pass it, but we're going to do everything we can on the side of the American people to try and stop a really bad bill from passing," the South Dakota senator added.

Since writing the following vanity in the wake of the health-care summit, we have been able to go to school on the courageous but beleaguered spectacle of Senator Jim Bunning fighting virtually alone for reason in the United States Senate. The spectacle teaches us that the Republicans have no stomach for the kind of fight which I describe below. It is not just the Susan Collins of Maine who spoke out against Bunning but it is also Mitch McConnell who, as caucus leader in the Senate, was conspicuously absent.

I am afraid Republican Senators will see no personal advantage in bringing upon themselves the full fury of the establishment media which they just witnessed unleashed against Senator Bunning. The Republicans will doubtless choose the softer path of accepting defeat with suitable loud and indignant protests knowing that they will prosper at the polls in November. If they shut down the government now, they risk November.

Here is the vanity:

RECONCILIATION OR NUCLEAR OPTION?

In the wake of yesterday's summit on health care reform one must ask, what were the Democrats up to and did they accomplish what they set out to do? Let's peel away some onion

The Democrats profess to have arranged the conference so that leading members of the House and Senate could reason together that bipartisanship might bloom and a compromise on health care reform might be achieved as the participants grasp hands and sing kumbaya as they dance around the anointed one. Nobody on Free Republic believes that anything remotely so noble could possibly animate the calculations of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

The summit was arranged by the Democrats to provide Obama with a forum in which she would demonstrate as he did in the Maryland summit with the house his mastery of the subject and his dominance as the Alpha male over the benighted Republicans. The demonstration would reveal for the whole country that the Republicans were the party of no and public support for their position, or more precisely, public opposition to the health-care reform bills would diminish. If that objective were the purpose of the meeting, the Democrats did not achieve their goal. If anything the Republicans demonstrated their mastery of the subject and the Democrats looked ill informed and ill at ease. But I do not think that was exactly the motivation for the summit.

I believe the Democrats are looking down the road and there are two or three factions who see the path ahead from different perspectives. The president knows that he is not up for reelection until 2012 and, anyway, as a radical ideologue he is certainly as concerned with fashioning a legacy as he is with an election three years away. The Democrats from safe districts (assuming after Massachusetts that there are such districts), especially those in the house like Nancy Pelosi who are in leadership and who enjoy relative immunity from the generalized irritation of the voters, see the fate of the health-care bill to be a judgment on their leadership and so they are for passage of some bill at virtually any cost, or at least at any cost to other more vulnerable Democrats such as the Blue Dogs. There are the black Democrat Congressman who are immune from election losses and whose constituencies will support virtually any strong-arm methods the Democrats choose to use. Finally there are the vulnerable Democrats, the Blue Dogs and many senators who a few months ago had reason to believe that their seats would be secure in 2010.

Only the last group has much to fear from strong-arming healthcare through Congress by way of nuclear option. In fact, in the majority of these categories of Democrats will be reelected so long as their base comes out. Hence, from their perspective they have more to fear from passive failure to enact health care insurance reform then they do from the indignant reaction of moderate and independent middle America whom they understand from the polls is generally opposed to the legislation. Of course, that means that there is a real and no doubt growing rift within the Democratic Party as the interests of those in vulnerable seats become clearly more and more endangered by those in safer seats. But, as we shall see later, maybe not.

As Obama, Pelosi and the African-American Democrats size up the situation, they are impelled toward a cram-down by way of "reconciliation." They fear only the reaction from their base for want of ardor on their part.

So the drama moves toward a nuclear option showdown. In this context, the summit can be seen as a softening up barrage to prepare the battlefield for reconciliation. Confronted with reconciliation, the Republicans can either raise hell and hope to gain ground in the next election, hoping that sometime between now and five years when the reconciliation bill must expire without healthcare having kicked in, they can prevent its extension. Alternatively, the Republicans can aggressively counterattack by filing virtually an infinite number of amendments and delay the vote indefinitely. They could have each amendment read word by word etc.

Once the Republicans do that they have effectively shut down the government. It is not even a generation ago that we ran through this scenario when Gingrich and the House Republicans dragged a very reluctant Bob Dole and his go- along to get- along Republican Senatorial colleagues, to White House sessions to negotiate for a balanced budget. More than Monica Lewinsky resulted. The Republicans lost that public-relations battle.

It might well be that the Democrats know why Republicans lost that battle, the press went to war against Gingrich and the Republicans. Republican solidarity cracked in the wake of sob stories about sleigh ride drivers in Yellowstone being out of work. The Democrats might well now be calculating that the press will so disparage the Republicans as "the party of no" that they could even turn around their electoral chances in November, just as occurred after Monica delivered her pizzas.

So the summit as conducted by the leading Democrats who are impelled toward a cram down could be seen as a reconnaissance in force to probe Republican solidarity and test public reaction in the wake of the conference. I think public reaction will have less of an impact on their strategy than we might think and for the reasons expressed above. If the Democrats were testing the media, they must be on balance disappointed with the reaction in the establishment press. But that does not mean they cannot enlist the media in a crusade against the Republicans who can be painted as shutting down the government without which they believe no man can exist.

For their part, Republicans must realistically assess their resolution to carry on to the end. We saw how Olympia Snowe flirted with the enemy. We know that Graham will seek to gain center stage by triangulating against the Republicans. Scott Brown is an unknown quantity, especially after his vote on the jobs bill. It would be fatal to start to shut down the government if the center does not hold. If Republicans buckle halfway through, the entire dynamic could change before November 2010. Clearly, shutting down the Senate with amendments is a tactic which should not be started if only to be abandoned. Either Obama or the Republicans will emerge from such a battle, but not both. The Nuclear Option is our equivalent of regicide and we all know what happens to those who try to kill the King and fail. The press will probably be against the Republicans. Most of the Democrats have nothing to lose. Many of the Democrats who do have something to lose are looking for a game changer. Chaos is certainly a game changer. Republicans must be certain that resolve on their side is greater than the resolve on the Democrat side.

The Democrats have every incentive to drag the country into chaos. Barack Obama personally, as a radical redistributionist and a Manchurian Marxist who was a disciple of Saul Alinsky, might very well actually welcome such chaos. Under these circumstances reconciliation could easily become a "nuclear option." That is not to say that Republicans ought not to fight the matter with every weapon and with every amendment at their disposal. It is only to say that they should heed the advice of General James Longstreet on the eve of Pickett's charge and not go into battle with only one boot on.

To paraphrase Shakespeare:

If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well. It were done resolutely.

Normally i don’t like to see strategy announced in advance.

But in this case, it is imperative that we give details of our strategy, and that we demonstrate that it will work.

Because the fight here is to convince the House democrats that they CANNOT COUNT ON reconciliation turning out the way they want.

That is the battle. If the house democrats THINK they can trust reconciliation, they WILL pass the senate health bill, and it will become law.

After that, blocking reconciliation will be a pretty much useless endeavor. And in fact, we might WANT to support reconciliation at that point, because it might well make the senate bill better.

Think about that — if the Senate bill IS LAW, would we oppose a reconciliation that eliminated payoffs for states, added 4 ideas the republicans wanted, and fixed the abortion funding (not saying these area what will be in reconciliation, just showing how it might well be in the republican interest to support reconciliation).

This is the real problem here. We have already gotten a bill past the 60-vote threshold. That bill is a disaster. But if the house votes on it, it will be law, and that will be the new baseline for our actions.

If the hosue democrats figure that out, and decide they can live with whatever we throw into reconciliation, they might be convinced to pass the senate bill.

So it is imperative that we show them how we will change the reconciliation to make it unacceptable to them.

And it is important we make the democrats pay for voting for the original senate bill while pretending they would get another shot at fixing it or stopping it later.

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