President Obama is desperate to pass his unpopular health care bill. So desperate, in fact, he wants to ram it through the House if Scott Brown wins the election tomorrow and he loses that 60th Senate vote.
A panicky White House and Democratic allies scrambled Sunday for a plan to salvage their hard-fought health care package in case a Republican wins Tuesday’s Senate race in Massachusetts, which would enable the GOP to block further Senate action.
The likeliest scenario would require persuading House Democrats to accept a bill the Senate passed last month, despite their objections to several parts.
Aides consulted Sunday amid fears that Republican Scott Brown will defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in the special election to fill the late Edward M. Kennedy’s seat. A Brown win would give the GOP 41 Senate votes, enough to filibuster and block final passage of the House-Senate compromise on health care now being crafted.
House Democrats, especially liberals, viewed those compromises as vital because they view the Senate-passed version as doing too little to help working families. Under the Senate-passed bill, 94 percent of Americans would be covered, compared to 96 percent in the version passed last year by the House.
The House plan would increase taxes on millionaires while the Senate plan would tax so-called Cadillac, high-cost health insurance plans enjoyed by many corporate executives as well as some union members. …
Ed Morrissey explained why it’s very unlikely the bill will pass in the House.
Likelihood of passage in the House: slim. It’s not impossible, of course, but the original House version only passed by three votes, one of them Republican Joe Cao of New Orleans. True, that was a managed vote; Pelosi had a few more Democrats who could have switched votes at the time, but she managed to protect them from the political damage of a yes vote. Without a public option, some of her progressive caucus will bolt, especially with the so-called Cadillac-plan tax in place that hits unions.
It seems that the White House has belatedly agreed with Fred Barnes that Paul Kirk stops being a Senator on Tuesday night and cannot provide a 60th vote for an ObamaCare compromise, even if Massachusetts delays certification of Scott Brown, assuming he wins. If their Plan B consists of forcing the Senate version onto the House, ObamaCare is very close to getting derailed — and Obama will have lost six months of the legislative calendar on the biggest defeat since George Bush failed to get a revamp of Social Security in 2005. ….
Read the whole post, Ed highlighted a glaring omission by Obama in his rally for Martha Coakley yesterday. Very interesting…
Via memeorandum
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