Can One New Senator Sink Health Care Reform?
That is the question that many reform supporters are asking themselves this week, after the surprise election last Tuesday of Republican Scott Brown to a Senate seat in Massachusetts previously held by the late Edward Kennedy.
Senator Kennedy was famously a champion of health care reform, who worked tirelessly towards the goal of improving health care access for all Americans practically until the day that he died.
Now, the fear (and the hope of HCR foes) is that the one additional vote gained by Republicans in the Senate will be enough to stop all further work on reform legislation.
Why would one vote make such a big difference?
Prior to Sen. Brown's election, the Democratic senators who were shepherding the various reform bills through the twists and turns of the law-making process, held a 60 seat "super majority" in the Senate, ensuring enough votes to pass the legislation even if ALL Republican senators voted "Nay" (which they did on a staggeringly regular basis).
Now the Republicans have the power to "filibuster", that is to block the legislation from moving forward.
The Republicans are widely expected to use this power.
Now what?
The Democrats in the Senate have a few options, however, none of them appear to be palatable to the leadership:
• They can try to pass the legislation in the week to two before Sen. Brown is formally seated
• They can ask the House of Representatives to pass the Senate bill, and then "ram" the bill through the Senate through a process called reconciliation, which requires only a 51-seat majority
• They can try to convince Sen. Brown, who professes to be very independent, and comes from a state which already has enacted sweeping health insurance and health care reform legislation, that HCR is for the good of the country and he should support it
But none of these options are likely to work.
Instead, the likely next step is a significant slow-down in the push for reform, and a return to the status-quo, or in other words, nothing has changed, except that many more Americans are now possibly aware for the need for reform, while many more, apparently, are now completely against it for reasons that they themselves probably don't understand very well.
posted by KJ Wojciechowski at 6:03 PM
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