Speaker Hope.
Fresh report from Steve Dennis, Roll Call, that some of the Bart Stupak Dirty Dozen are slipping away from the coalition to resist the Senate bill and that not all is gloom and despair in the Speaker's office. The White House's Rahm Emanuel attended a think tank session on the Hill in this news cycle, all of the leadership and staff gathered together to go over lists and lay out what is to be done. Steve Dennis believes the vote is much closer than the Speaker is mentioning. I asked if the number was still under 200, and Steve Dennis answered that he believes it is closer than that, but that there will be no movement until they have 216.
Speaker Despair.
Late in the evening, spoke to Jonathan Allen, Politico, re the story breaking late that Eric Massa's chief of staff, Joe Racalto, told a staff memeber of Nancy Pelosi's last October 2009 about Massa's living with junior staff members and had hired too many aides. The puzzle is what did the unnamed staffer do with the heads-up. As of now, Jonathan Allen does not have the answer to what happened to the report. There is no FOIA for members of Congress, so there is no discovery. Racalto has not been questioned yet. Also, Mrs. Pelosi is spinning this that she only heard rumors. Hill source tells me that Mrs. Pelosi likely sent the unnamed staffer out to leak the tale in order to control the spin. The contest now is to explain the process without admitting that Mrs. Pelosi knew of the troubles before Steny Hoyer learned if it on February 8.
If ‘health care’ passes, it will be a tribute to Obama and Democrats. They will have achieved the impossible. Legality is not an issue.
We can only hope that Republicans learn from this exercise. Bush and Republicans warned of impending fiscal meltdown as early as 2001. In 2008 alone, President Bush publicly called for GSE reform 17 times. Unfortunately, these warnings went unheeded, as the President's repeated attempts to reform the supervision of Freddie and Fanny were thwarted by the legislative tricks of those who falsely denied there were problems.
Bush knew, but couldn’t get it done. Why were Republicans never taken seriously while we now stand helplessly by as (everyone agrees that) Democrats are leading us to abject ruin?
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Stupak started waffling on Monday night. Remember, though, that the Stupak 12 all voted YES the first time, so if they vote YES again it's still 216-215 in favor without any other defections on either side we don't know about yet. I find it easiest to think about the probabilities here by assuming all of the Stupak 12 will end up doing a Mary Landrieux and caving at the last minute with some lame-ass reason or other, and say, "Do we have at least two more people who will change from YES to NO"? I think one is Arcuri which puts us 216-215 in favor of the good guys. In short, assuming a complete Stupak cave-in, no other flip-flops, and Arcuri changing from YES to NO, the bill is defeated. And that's a very conservative count.