Health Reform: It's the Final Countdown

The greatest show on reality television today is on CPSAN. If you're near a TV today, be sure to tune in. In case you need a quick refresher on what is happening today in the House, here is a summary:

Health care reform legislation that would extend health insurance to millions of Americans who are currently uninsured, offer tax cuts to small businesses to help them insure their employees, and prevent health insurance companies from dropping coverage for patients who become seriously ill has already passed with clear majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The House passed its health care reform bill in back in November; the Senate passed its own version of reform legislation on Christmas Eve.

For the past few months, the main obstacle in the way of putting a final health care reform bill on the President's desk to be officially signed into law has been the task of reconciling the not insignificant differences between those two bills.The process of combining the two versions of health care reform legislation into one bill that would be supported by majorities in both the Senate and the House has been hampered by the Democrats' loss of a seat in the Senate after the death of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, long a champion in the fight for a more affordable, more equitable health care system.

Left with 59 votes out of 100 in the Senate, Democrats have been stymied in their original plans to pass a combined bill quickly by the threat of a Republican filibuster, which would force the Democrats to garner 60 votes (a supermajority) to pass any new bill. After several failed attempts to negotiate with Senate Republicans to try to create a bipartisan version of the bill that would garner a few Republican votes, Democrats have devised a solution that gets around the filibuster problem: The House will pass the Senate version of the bill as-is, which will make the Senate bill eligible to be signed into law. But the Senate has agreed that they will immediately thereafter pass a new piece of legislation that amends their original bill in accordance with compromise proposals outlined by members of the House and the President.

The Senate will use budget reconciliation procedures to pass amendments to their bill, a process which limits what kind of legislative changes the Senate can make, but eliminates the need for 60 votes to overcome a filibuster — instead, the Senate Dems will only need a simple majority of 51.

Today, the House of Representatives will vote on whether to pass the Senate version of the health care reform bill. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has indicated she believes Democrats have enough votes in support of the bill to pass it. Once it passes, the Democrats' new plan to pass health care will be set in motion and is almost certain to succeed.

So if health care reform passage is now almost guaranteed, what about today's vote could possibly be so interesting?

Well, Republicans in Congress, having run out of other options to try stop a health care reform bill that has already been approved by a majority of America's democratically elected Congresspeople, have vowed to delay today's vote for as long as possible by invoking every parliamentary procedural objection possible. Republican Representative John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, has said, ""We're going to continue to work closely together to do everything that we can do to make sure that this bill never, ever, ever passes." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said, "Our plan is for it not to come to the Senate."

Unable to stop the progress of this legislation by any usual democratic means, but unwilling to admit defeat, the Republicans in Congress — ever the self-styled champions of government efficiency — intend to mire it in sheer bureaucracy for one last long legislative day by pulling out every stalling tactic they can think of to gum up the government's gears.

I've no doubt it will be a virtuosic display truly worthy of the term "political circus."

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander has called the Democratic fight to pass health care reform a "political kamikaze mission." But the flameout you'll more likely see today on CSPAN is the desperate last attempt by the GOP to convince the American public they didn't lose the last election.