Top Dems indicate health care bill may fail

On Monday Sen. Christopher Dodd stated on CNBC that the health care negotiations are “hanging by a thread.”

The next day Rep. Charles Rangel said that Democrats face “serious problems” in getting a healthcare reform bill passed. “We’ve got to get a bill that’s more compatible to the House. Forget all the other questions. Two-hundred-eighteen [votes] is the most important issue we are dealing with … We have serious problems on both sides of the Capitol. Serious problems.”

At past stages of this saga, it was right-leaning journalists who kept telling us that the bill was in trouble, and then their prognostications were proved wrong time and again as the bill kept advancing. This is the first time I’ve seen influential Congressional Democrats say, not only that the bill faces difficult obstacles, but that it’s in grave trouble.

Update: Ezra Klein at the Washington Post writes that not even a Scott Brown win in Massachusetts and an impending loss of the Democrats’ 60th seat in the Senate will stop the bill, because:

Given that there’s not much left to be done on the health-care bill, Democrats can move pretty fast on this if they suddenly need to do so.

So, Rangel says the thing is “hanging by a thread,” while Klein says there’s “not much left to be done” on it. Hmm. Maybe what Klein means is that there’s not much to be done to snip the thread on which it’s hanging.

Excuse the wishful thinking.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 13, 2010 04:45 PM | Send