True North

Stick a fork in the Slaughter Solution. It's history. Based on this Roll Call article, that strategy died with the Senate Parliamentarian's ruling:

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.

Wobbly House Democrats don't want to vote for the Senate bill without a guarantee of the Senate passing a bill that fixes what's broken in the Senate bill. House Democrats thought that they'd found a solution with the Slaughter Solution, in which the Senate bill would be deemed passed the minute the House passed a bill fixing the Senate bill. Under the Slaughter Solution rule, the House wouldn't even vote on the Senate bill.

With the Senate Parliamentarian's ruling, that solution disappeared.

I just finished a blogger conference call with Dr. Phil Gingrey and Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers. This Roll Call article was the basis for my question and followup. I read them the opening paragraphs of the article, then posed my initial question. I asked specifically if the Senate Parliamentarian's ruling just made Rep. Clyburn's whip duties significantly more difficult. Their opinion was that it did make Rep. Clyburn's job much more difficult.

This ruling won't kill the bill but it's going to make life alot more difficult for House Democrats. Now they'll have to trust that their Senate colleagues will want to pass and be able to pass a bill fixing the problems with their bill. Earlier this week, Rep. Thad McCotter said in an interview that the House Democrats' biggest obstacle "isn't from across the aisle. It's from across the Rotunda."

In the best of times, there's a tension between the House and Senate. Add the historic nature of this bill and the profound differences between the House's bill and the Senate's bill, plus the fact that the public is emphatically opposed to this bill and it's understandable that tensions are running high between House and Senate Democrats.

Add into this mix Harry Reid's latest statement:

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moved Thursday to put Senate Republicans on the defensive over health care, sending a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in which he dared the GOP to vote against reform.

If anyone has a worse tin ear than Harry Reid, I wouldn't know who it'd be. Dr. Gingrey and Rep. McMorris-Rodgers said that they'd be surprised if a single Republican, House or Senate, would vote for the bill. Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the NRSC, and Minority Leader McConnell both said that Republicans will run on the health care issue.

With the latest CNN poll showing 73 percent of the American people either outright opposed to the Democrats' bill or wanting Congress to start from scratch, it isn't a matter of whether Republicans will run on this issue. The question I've got is how many Democrats will run away from this bill this fall. I'm betting Democrats won't want to talk health care during their campaign.

I'm betting that they'd rather align themselves with Eric Massa than with the Democrats' health care legislation.

Comments welcome at LFR.

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