The description “game-changer” has been heard frequently since this week’s upset in Massachusetts.
Providing Senate Republicans with the 41st vote necessary to filibuster legislation, the most immediate effect of Scott Brown’s win is the GOP’s ability to bring the health care bill to a screeching halt.
Politico sums up the situation in one headline – “Dazed Democrats Rethink Entire Strategy.”
Mere days since the White House hosted grueling marathon talks with Democratic lawmakers in order to push the bill through Congress, President Obama is now exercising caution and calling for restrain, lest the entire overhaul fall apart with Brown’s arrival on the scene. He also warned Democrats to not ram the bill through before Brown takes his seat in the Senate.
“The people of Massachusetts spoke,” Obama said. “He’s got to be part of that process.”
In an interview with ABC News yesterday, the president suggested that he would rather scale back the legislation than lose it entirely, centering “around those elements in the package that people agree on.”
That could mean removing the contentious mandate in the Senate bill requiring everyone to buy insurance. And then there are the other differences in the Senate version that House Democrats oppose – a tax on high-value insurance plans, for instance, that would especially hit union households, as well as lower subsidies to help the uninsured get coverage. The Washington Post reports on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi struggling to herd an increasingly reluctant Democratic majority.
In terms of the main issue of concern for Catholics – the Senate bill’s weak restrictions on abortion funding – Rep. Bart Stupak was quoted this week yesterday saying that the legislation as is will fail in the House, with or without changed language on abortion.
“I don’t think you can find 100 votes in the House for that bill,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “Even before you get to abortion, there are three or four major issues to worry about.”
The American Catholic blog highlighted another interview with Stupak, this time with The Washington Examiner, in which he touched on the differences between his amendment restricting federal funds for abortion and the Senate’s.
“The Nelson Amendment did a number of different things and got so complicated,” he said, continuing:
I mean, mine’s a two-page amendment. Every time you look at these amendments, whether it’s the Nelson Amendment or the Capps Amendment ... they’re all 10 to 12 pages. It’s sort of like when the American people say, wait a minute, there’s no public funding for abortion, you can put that on one page. Why do you need 12 pages to try to explain what you’re doing? Well, because you’ve got this here and this one has to pay this and that. It gets all complicated.
How Brown’s win – and the shift in strategy it’s already caused among Democrats – will ultimately affect abortion language in health care seems unclear, though Stupak has stated that he has “10 or 11” fellow Democrats behind him willing to withhold their vote from the final legislation if it fails to include the strong language of his amendment. At the least, it buys pro-lifers more time to continue to contact their representatives and remind them that the majority of Americans do not want the government to fund abortions.
One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be a wild ride.
-- Elizabeth Hansen, Headline Bistro editor
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