The Pelosi strategy is deceptively simple: Pass the Senate bill through the House and have the president sign ObamaCare into law. It is straight out of a 7th grade civics class: If both houses of Congress pass identical bills, there is no need to reconcile the two. The bill can go straight to the president to be signed into law. The Senate bill is the vehicle to enact ObamaCare. All the talk of reconciliation is a smokescreen, and I fear that we are all buying in to a process they are trying to make look complicated but isn't.
There will be effort to come up with a second bill to fix problems the House has with the Senate bill, but any other legislation passed through reconciliation or any other process in the Senate would be a totally separate piece of legislation. Whether it passes or not is irrelevant. It is not tied in any legal way to the 2,700 - page Senate bill. Pelosi and Obama will have achieved their goal if they get the House to agree to pass the Senate bill.
Members are being told that they have to vote for the Senate bill to "keep the process moving" so the leaders can negotiate a reconciliatiion bill. But what happens if the House votes for the Senate bill but the Senate can't pass a separate reconciliation bill? Pelosi and Reid would have maneuvered one bill through both the House and Senate, and ObamaCare would then be only one signature away from enactment.
The health reform debate can be bewildering, with thousands of pages of legislation and mind-numbing complexity of parliamentary procedures. But none of that matters now.
The Congress is just one vote away from passing legislation that would put one sixth of our economy under permanent government control.
How can that be when this legislation is so overwhelmingly disapproved by the American people?
President Obama and his congressional allies are meeting with House Democrats to convince them to vote for the Senate bill "to just keep the process moving."
But if the House passes the Senate bill with a simple majority of 217 votes, ObamaCare becomes the law of the land. Nothing else matters. The Senate may, or may not, pass a second bill to "fix" problems the House has with their provisions. It matters not.
It would be the dupe of all time if House members were to be convinced that they must go first to keep the process moving forward, only to find that ObamaCare has passed the finish line. If the House passes legislation identical to the Senate bill, the president signs it, and it becomes law.
That means House Democrats will be on the hook for a vote for:
The Cornhusker Kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, and every other vote-buying deal buried in the Senate bill.
Abortion language that clearly allows federal funding for abortion and which the U.S. Conference of Bishops solidly opposes.
The Cadillac tax on high-cost health insurance policies that labor unions hate.
Weak enforcement provisions for the individual mandate that health insurers say will cause pools to disintegrate, causing premiums to skyrocket for those still buying policies.
If the House complies, and Speaker Pelosi is close to having the needed votes, then President Obama would sign his comprehensive health reform plan in the form of the Senate bill the next day, and the job would be done. Any promises that it would be fixed later on aren't worth the paper they might, or might not, be written on.
This is the end game. The White House is going for broke on ObamaCare.
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Here is a link to my post on National Review about how this impacts the abortion debate http://healthcare.nationalreview.com/
