219-212!

Next: a motion to recommit the reconciliation bill, and then a vote on the reconciliation bill itself.

Update: Last trick by Republicans was to make the motion to recommit about abortion to try to peel off pro-life Dems.  Stupak, the ultra-prolife Dem, rises to urge a no vote.  Burn.

Motion to recommit is denied, 199-232.

Update2: Reconciliation bill passes, 220-211

btw, nothing is more funny to me than a 20 year-old, who is still covered on his parent’s insurance, calling in to c-span to express his distaste for the bill.  how about you try paying for it first before you make dumb comments?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that getting HCR passed the House is nearly impossible without Bart Stupak’s blessing.  Stupak is controlling ~8 votes, most people think.  There are apparently furious negotiations happening between Stupak, pro-choice Dems, and Pelosi + WH to hammer out a deal.

Bottom line: watch Stupak.  If he’s a yes, this thing is gonna pass.

Update: I get the feeling (just from reading tweets from boots on the ground) that there are some in Stupak’s bloc that may break even if a Stupak deal goes sour. The question is how many?

Update2: Stupak is holding a press conference at 4pm ET.

Update3: The Hill is reporting a deal has been made and the Stupak bloc will vote yes…it will be official at 4pm presser

Update4: It’s official. Stupak is a yes. HCR will pass today.

Stupak was joined by 6 other Reps., 4 of which were undecided (Rahall, Driehaus, Dahlkemper, Mollohan). This puts the NYT’s count at 216. Pop the champagne!

Update5: House approves rules for debate 224-206. This is a good sign that everything is on track.

Update6: I don’t want to read too much into this, but here’s a list of undecideds that voted no on the Rules:

Side note – I just realized that House votes are in xml format, makes it easy to crunch. Go USA!

The story is that Obama had nothing prepared when he addressed the House Democratic Caucus today, and it definitely has a very loose structure. But I think this is one of his bests. It is very inside baseball stuff, but it gives you a nice window into this man’s soul.

The close:

And now a lot of us have been here a while and everybody here has taken their lumps and their bruises. And it turns out people have had to make compromises, and you’ve been away from families for a long time and you’ve missed special events for your kids sometimes. And maybe there have been times where you asked yourself, why did I ever get involved in politics in the first place? And maybe things can’t change after all. And when you do something courageous, it turns out sometimes you may be attacked. And sometimes the very people you thought you were trying to help may be angry at you and shout at you. And you say to yourself, maybe that thing that I started with has been lost.

But you know what? Every once in a while, every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, you’re right, the system is not working for you and I’m going to make it a little bit better.

And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why I’ve made those sacrifices. Because I believe so deeply in this country and I believe so deeply in this democracy and I’m willing to stand up even when it’s hard, even when it’s tough.

Every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself. And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine. We have been debating health care for decades. It has now been debated for a year. It is in your hands. It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow.

Thank you very much, House of Representatives. Let’s get this done.

Now go read the whole thing.

The vote in the House on health care reform will be tomorrow.  Things are looking up, but they are far from assured.  So far, Dems have gotten 7 yes-to-no switchers, but there are still quite a few undecideds that voted yes last time.

Below is the list of Undecideds as of this morning (Source=NYT).  Per Nate Silver, Chris Carney is now a Yes.  If any of these Reps. happen to be your congressperson, give them a call, and tell them how you feel.

Update:  I’ve been updating the list below as I’ve gotten more info.

The thing that is so frustrating about talk a paring down the current Senate bill is that the Senate bill is already pared down.  We went through weeks and weeks of rubbing Ben Nelson’s and Joe Lieberman’s feet by getting rid of the public option, taxes on rich people, and any other good policy ideas that twinged an already raw nerve of “looking liberal.”

What we’re left with then is just basic insurance reform, which goes something like this:

1. People are pissed that insurance companies are screwing them by claiming pre-existing condition exclusions.
2. In order to stop (1), we ban this practice
3. In order to accomplish (2) without people abusing insurance companies (i.e. get insurance when they get sick), we impose an individual mandate.
4. In order to accomplish (3) without forcing poor people to go bankrupt buying health insurance they can’t afford, we provide subsidies to buy insurance.
5. In order to pay for (4), we cut waste in Medicare and impose new taxes.

There’s really nothing here to take out, because it’s all related; you take out one, and all the cards fall.

It’s not just me saying this either.  Check with the experts:

“The idea of scaled back reform, and particularly of doing insurance reforms by themselves, is a fantasy,” says Richard Kirsch, director of the reform campaign Health Care for America Now. “The public wants to stop insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. You can’t do that without a mandate; you can’t do a mandate without subsidizing coverage; you can’t subsidize coverage without Medicare savings and new revenues. The public wants to end medical bankruptcies – but to do that you need to provide affordable coverage to people and you need to mandate decent insurance benefits and put a ban on annual and lifetime caps. Doing all that requires setting up exchanges and subsidizing coverage.”

Thankfully, President Obama sees things the same way:

If you ask the American people about health care, one of the things that drives them crazy is insurance companies denying people coverage because of preexisting conditions. Well, it turns out that if you don’t — if you don’t make sure that everybody has health insurance, then you can’t eliminate insurance companies — you can’t stop insurance companies from discriminating against people because of preexisting conditions. Well, if you’re going to give everybody health insurance, you’ve got to make sure it’s affordable. So it turns out that a lot of these things are interconnected.

Now, I could have said, well, we’ll just do what’s safe. We’ll just take on those things that are completely noncontroversial. The problem is the things that are noncontroversial end up being the things that don’t solve the problem. And this is true on every issue.

Where does that leave us?  It leaves us with 256 gutless, crybabies huddled in a corner.  No one but Congressional Democrats are so good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The path is simple.  Pass the bill.

Scott Brown, former Cosmo centerfold, is the next Senator of Massachusetts.

There’s a lot of things you can potentially say about this race.  Martha Coakley was clearly a pretty terrible candidate.  On the right, you’re going to hear a lot about this being a referendum on heralth care and Obama in general.  This, I think, is clearly off-base.  This race was never about the issues.  This race was entirely about personality.

(more…)

Nate Silver:

The FiveThirtyEight Senate Forecasting Model, which correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate races in 2008, now regards Republican Scott Brown as a 74 percent favorite to win the Senate seat in Massachusetts on the basis of new polling from ARG, Research 2000 and InsiderAdvantage which show worsening numbers for Brown’s opponent, Martha Coakley.

Andrew Sullivan despairs:

Democrats can stop hoping at this point.

I can see no alternative scenario but a huge – staggeringly huge – victory for the FNC/RNC machine tomorrow. They crafted a strategy of total oppositionism to anything Obama proposed a year ago. Remember they gave him zero votes on even the stimulus in his first weeks. They saw health insurance reform as Obama’s Waterloo, and, thanks in part to the dithering Democrats, they beat him on that hill. They have successfully channeled all the rage at the massive debt and recession the president inherited on Obama after just one year. If they can do that already, against the massive evidence against them, they have the power to wield populism to destroy any attempt by government to address any actual problems.

This is a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power … to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.

What comes next will be a real test for Obama. I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.

This is bad.  Real bad.

There’s still a chance that Coakley will win, but it will have to be a perfect storm of response bias and a big GOTV push tomorrow, which at this point seems unlikely.

I hope people in Massachusetts know what they’re doing.

I’ve been very critical of my friends over at DKos lately, and I can’t seem to stop.  I wandered over again today to see the reaction to health care reform passing the Senate, and the reaction was fairly positive.  There was a nice post by DemFromCT.

But then I looked further down and ran across this post quoting Drew Westen, who I am told “isn’t just any guy with a computer. He’s an expert on political communication, the guy who wrote The Political Brain, and as digby says, the “it boy” of the Democratic party.”  So obviously, he’s the bees knees, and we should all hail his opinion:

What’s costing the president are three things: a laissez faire style of leadership that appears weak and removed to everyday Americans, a failure to articulate and defend any coherent ideological position on virtually anything, and a widespread perception that he cares more about special interests like bank, credit card, oil and coal, and health and pharmaceutical companies than he does about the people they are shafting….

Consider the president’s leadership style, which has now become clear: deliver a moving speech, move on, and when push comes to shove, leave it to others to decide what to do if there’s a conflict, because if there’s a conflict, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near it. [...]

Leadership means heading into the eye of the storm and bringing the vessel of state home safely, not going as far inland as you can because it’s uncomfortable on the high seas. This president has a particular aversion to battling back gusting winds from his starboard side (the right, for the nautically challenged) and tends to give in to them. He just can’t tolerate conflict, and the result is that he refuses to lead….

The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn’t exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren’t going to rip off the American people any more, and they backed up their words with actions. Teddy Roosevelt was clear that capital gains taxes should be high relative to income taxes because we should reward work, not “gambling in stocks.” This President just doesn’t have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do (except women to have unwanted babies because they can’t afford an abortion or live in a red state and don’t have an employer who offers insurance), and his advisors are enabling his most troubling character flaw, his conflict-avoidance.

This is complete garbage.

May I remind Mr. Bad Ass Democrat Drew Westen that it was under Obama’s watch, his first year as President to boot, that comprehensive health care reform is about to be passed.  This is something that FDR and LBJ, heroes of progressive lore that they are, could not pass.

It was clear from the outset that the Senate never wanted to pass a bill, but we soldiered on.  Somehow Mr. Westin thinks that Barack Obama had nothing to do with it, which I find completely at odds with reality.

Furthermore, this is exactly the kind of attitude that frustrates me beyond belief from the netroots on this issue.  It’s this idea that if only Barack Obama got into a staring contest (or perhaps an arm wrestling match) with Joe Lieberman, then the public option would have passed.

Ridiculous.

With 60 votes, as promised.

Even though there’s still one more hurdle (getting the House and Senate to agree), this really is a huge achievement.

Matt Yglesias:

As you know, my view is this: For all its flaws, if signed into law this bill would be the greatest progressive social policy achievement in over forty years. It’s fine not to be satisfied with this legislation, but it’s perverse not to be happy about it. The important thing is to try to make sure that we don’t need to wait another forty years before additional major improvements become possible.

Ezra Klein:

H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed with 60 votes, and though that sounds a razor-thin margin given the odd rules of the Senate, it is a landslide in the more normal context for major choices in American politics. The last time a president won with 60 percent of the vote, for instance, was when Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964. Health-care reform passed the House with only 50.5 percent of the body voting for it. And the senators making up this morning’s 60 votes actually represent closer to 65 percent of the population. Harry Reid has much to be proud of today. [...]

Passing legislation, it turns out, is a long and ugly process. God, is it ugly. The compromises, both with powerful special interests and decisive senators. The trimming of ambitions and the budget gimmicks and the worship of Congressional Budget Office scores. By the end, you’re passing a compromise of a deal of a negotiation of a concession.

But bad a system as it might be, it’s the only one we’ve got. At least for now, this is what victory looks like. The slow, grinding, ineluctable advance of legislation that is quite similar, albeit not identical, to what you began with. It’s not pretty, and it doesn’t necessarily feel like winning is supposed to feel. But this bill will do most of the things supporters hoped it would do: cover about 95 percent of all legal residents, regulate insurers, set up competitive exchanges, pretty much end risk selection, institute a universal structure that we can improve and enhance as the years go on, and vastly reduce both medical and financial risk for families.

It’s been a long time since the legislative system did anything this big, and people have forgotten how awful the victories are. But these are the victories, and if they feel bad to many, they will do good for more. As that comes clearer and clearer, this bill will come to feel more and more like the historic advance it actually is.

Today is a good day for America.