Undecided House Dems openly state that distrust that Senate will follow through on reconciliation prevents them from voting for bill

Fox News reports this morning. ” ‘Trust’ gap between House, Senate Dems Hurting Health Care Push.” Indeed, while some say that the House is the thing, others increasingly realize—as shown in the Fox story—that what prevents the House from being the thing is that the Senate is really the thing. I made the same point last week in the entry, “House passage is everything—or is it?”

And this is why some House holdouts are insisting that Obama’s famous “final” push must begin in the Senate, not the House. Let the Senate show that they are capable of passing by reconciliation the additions to the bill that the House members require, by actually passing them. THEN the House will vote on that changed bill. That makes infinitely more sense than the House passing the Senate bill which Obama could then sign into law without the changes that the House holdouts require.

The Democratic leadership will likely resist the demand that the Senate act first. Why? Because they will see that some of the additions required by the House holdouts cannot be passed by reconciliation. In which case Obamacare will fail. But we don’t know this to be true. And this is where imponderables about reconciliation come into focus which apparently no human being at present, including not just you and me but even Senate Budget Committee Chairman Conrad, knows for sure. In any event we non-Democrats have no influence over what is decided among the House and Senate Democratic members. They could override all rules to the contrary and pass the bill tomorrow, and change America in an instant into a hideously controlled, unfree society, the unchanging dream of the left. That could happen. And that is why we need to appeal to help beyond the human. If we haven’t already done do, those of us who believe in God, in the Providence that numerous times in our history has rescued America from disaster, need to start praying.

- end of initial entry -

LA writes:

There is a procedural factor I had forgotten about that makes a Senate vote first problematic: under the Constitution, all spending bills must begin with the House of Representatives. However, blogger Keith Hennessey who is something of an expert on the health care bill says there are ways to work around that, but that he nevertheless expects that House to vote first.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 08, 2010 08:27 AM | Send