United Liberty

House and Senate Democrats got some bad news today as the Senate parliamentarian said that the House would have to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare and have it signed into law by the president before a fix could be pushed through via reconciliation:

The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Despite the parliamentarian’s ruling, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) doesn’t seem to have any concern about pressing ahead with reconciliation.

Given all the news surrounding the future of ObamaCare, it’s hard to tell what exactly is going on. On one hand, Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she has the votes and could pass the bill today if she really wanted to. On the other hand Rep. Bart Stupak, who is holding out over abortion language in the Senate verison of the bill, told the Weekly Standard that there is no deal with Democratic leadership and that he has 12 colleagues that orginally voted for the bill ready to vote against it this time around.

It also appears that Senate Republicans are prepared to force parliamentary points of order on reconciliation, which would keep non-budget related items out of the proposed fix (known as the Byrd Rule) provide the Senate parliamentarian agrees. This would include abortion language that pro-life Democrats are holding out for.

Assuming the parliamentarian rules against Democrats and Vice President Joe Biden attempts to overrule, Republicans claim they have the 51 votes necessary to sustain the point of order. Democrats could attempt to waive the Byrd Rule, but that requires 60 votes.

A couple of days ago, I pointed out that the abortion language in the health care bill backed by the Obama Administration could bring down ObamaCare. Yesterday, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), author of the amendment that helped ObamaCare pass in November by restricting taxpayer dollar for abortion, says that as many as 20 Democrats will not support the administration’s proposal:

Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who led efforts to tighten abortion language in the House health care bill, said Wednesday morning there are 15 to 20 House Democrats who cannot support President Barack Obama’s effort to bridge the gap between the House and Senate health plans.

The White House hopes the House will take up the Senate version of the health care bill, approve it, and then quickly approve a separate measure making changes to the Senate health legislation that answer House concerns. But Stupak, appearing on Fox News, called the president’s abortion language “unacceptable.”

He said well over a dozen House members will likely balk, not just on abortion but on the residual tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which he said the House had already rejected. The delayed implementation of that tax – to 2018 in the Obama version – only makes matters worse, Stupak said. Now, some House Democrats are wondering why they should vote at all on legislation that would not take effect even during a second Obama term.

One of the obstacles for President Barack Obama and Democrats in passing ObamaCare is the abortion language in the new proposal laid out yesterday by the administration:

With all the twists and turns of health care legislation, the trickiest practical problem now seems to be in the House, and whether Nancy Pelosi has the 218 votes required ot pass the bill.

Nobody seems to have a hard answer, with her margin of 220-215 now reduced to the bare minimum by Murtha’s death and Wexler’s retirement, and one more by Joseph Cao’s apparent signal that he won’t vote for the bill. Another Democrat, Neil Abercrombie, plans to retire at the end of this month.

And abortion, an issue whose political salience seemed pretty much gone by 2008, is again central. The Stupak-Pitts amendment is gone, and with it an unclear number of Democrats. Abortion foes are again organizing with the demand of an “explicit exclusion of public funds for abortion,” which they don’t see in the accounting mechanism Ben Nelson negotiated.

Democrats in House have zero room for dissent among the ranks, and still may kill the bill, which would be good news. Hopefully this time, Republicans will not let the anti-abortion lobby help them pass ObamaCare like they did back in November.

You remember all that grandstanding over the issue of abortion and the Stupak Amendment by Republicans on Saturday? Turns out the health insurance plan that the Republican National Committee offers employees covers the controversial procedure:

The Republican National Committee’s health insurance plan covers elective abortion – a procedure the party’s own platform calls “a fundamental assault on innocent human life.”

Federal Election Commission Records show the RNC purchases its insurance from Cigna. Two sales agents for the company said that the RNC’s policy covers elective abortion.

Informed of the coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho told Politico that the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.
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According to several Cigna employees, the insurer offers its customers the opportunity to opt out of abortion coverage – and the RNC did not choose to opt out.

According to Politico, the RNC will take steps to rectify the issue. Still though, how do they miss something like that?

As we said during our live-blog on Saturday and as Jeff Scott noted earlier today, Republicans made a mistake in supporting the Stupak Amendment to ObamaCare. It ultimately caused the bill to pass out of the House, as several pundits and reports said that Democrats didn’t have the votes to move HR 3962 without it.

Erick Erickson from Red State, a hub for conservatives in the blogosphere, takes aim at his own for supporting this amendment, and ostensibly allowing ObamaCare to pass the House:

It is more and more clear that the House of Representatives will not keep Bart Stupak’s amendment in the health care legislation.

Harry Reid will put something abortion related in the Senate version, but not so strong as to turn off pro-abortion Senators. Likewise, Obama is already saying this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill, and is instructing Congress not to go overboard.

Stupak will go out. National Right to Life, as per its usual operating procedure, will no doubt eek out some sort of minor compromise that undercuts the rest of the conservative movement and other pro-life groups — a compromise that does very little, but from which NRLC can raise some money. Abortions will get funded by the feds if Obamacare passes. You can bank on it.

Let me be clear to the conservative movement and the organizations participating in the health care debate: the fight over health care is about freedom, not your ridiculous little scorecards.

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Even though my most recent article for the conservative magazine Parcbench could understandably lead you to think otherwise, I am not a fan of abstinence campaigns. Abstinence campaigns are more obsessed with saving it for marriage, a legal contract that has little to do with love (I know people that have had decade long relationships without getting married and others that got married and then divorced months later), as opposed to the person who makes you feel comfortable. This was greatly satirized in an episode of King of the Hill in which Luanne marries a guy she just met because her and the guy really want to sleep together.