I had read and heard that Obama, Pelosi, Reid and other high-level dems were meeting this past weekend to talk about possible strategies for saving a large-scale health care bill like the versions that passed the House and Senate last year. Well today, Dick Morris reports on the plan that came out of those meetings. Here's the new plan, according to what sources have told Morris: First, the House will vote to pass the version of the bill that the Senate previously passed. That bill will then go to Obama, who will sign it into law. Of course, radical left progressives in the House hate the Senate bill -- And so why would they ever vote for it? Because in advance of voting for it, Senate dems will promise them in writing that certain changes will be made to the Senate bill after it's signed into law. How can that be, you ask? The changes will be made in the form of new legislation that will "amend" the bill that's already been signed into law.So next you ask -- How could such "amendments" ever get through the Senate since the dems have lost their 60-seat supermajority? Well, according to Morris, that's where the so-called "nuclear option" (the obscure budgetary procedure called "reconciliation") would come in, with the Senate ramming through the "amendments" by needing only 51 votes -- effectively bypassing the normal legislative process in the Senate, which requires 60 votes to avoid a filibuster.
Now, if there was ever a case in which a person actually hates to say I told you so, this would it. I only wish the dems' massive and widely unpopular health care bill was truly dead. Maybe it will still die (e.g., if not enough House or Senate dems agree to buy in on this new Obama/Pelosi/Reid plan), but it certainly would appear that it ain't dead yet (subject to Morris' sources being way off, which I doubt).
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