Healthcare Reform Passes Major Procedural Hurdle
by Brien Jackson
In the wee morning hours, Senate Democrats were able to invoke cloture on Harry Reid’s manager’s amendment to the Senate healthcare reform bill via a 60-40 vote. All 58 Democrats and the chamber’s 2 independents voted for cloture, while all 40 Republicans, including Senators Collins and Snowe of Maine, voted against cloture. This essentially takes healthcare reform in the Senate from a precarious position to foregone conclusion, as all that’s left is a series of votes that should largely be academic. After that we’ll move to conference, and then back to the House and Senate for a vote on the conference bill.
Ezra Klein has a good round-up of the changes the amendment makes to the bill here, and I’ll just add that it really does look like this is the best we could have hoped for out of the Senate. It’s less than a lot of progressives allowed themselves to imagine they were going to get, but when you count the votes in the chamber, it’s pretty clear that this is the most ambitious package you could get 60 Senators to vote for. That’s disappointing for a variety of reason, not least of which being the unbearable lightness of the opposition from people like Ben Nelson, to say nothing of the outright mendacity of Joe Lieberman, but it is what it is, and you have to take the best deal you can get to keep moving the ball forward. Not passing this bill because it isn’t a touchdown wouldn’t help anyone in the near term, nor would it help in the long term. It would just be yet another setback to the cause we call healthcare reform, and it would be a failure that would reverberate for a generation. In 25 years, the lesson internalized would be that even very large Democratic majorities couldn’t pass this bill, and the next attempt would be even further watered down. And for whatever the bill’s flaws, it’s a more ambitious effort than anything we’ve done on the healthcare reform front in at least the last 40 years.
It’s also worth remembering that just because this bill passes doesn’t mean the work is done, in the same way a football team achieving a first down, but coming up short of a touchdown, doesn’t mean they call it a drive and walk off the field. There will still be a lot of work to do, a lot of things left to achieve, but we’ll be that much closer to the endzone.