The Healthcare Summit - Be There or Be Republican

Tomorrow President Obama is hosting the televised bipartisan summit on healthcare! You remember, the one that the Republicans were so nervous about?

Although on the eve of the summit (why do they call everything a “summit” these days, I mean this seems like more of a meeting and less of an overdramatic “summit”) it’s not the Republicans who are feeling uneasy. Basically, it would be a shame for the Democrats to come up empty handed on an issue that has taken up so much of our national conversation in the last year, especially in an election year. But the Dems aren’t even sure they can get enough votes on their own side of the aisle.

Obviously, if you’ve been paying attention at all in the last year, bipartisan solutions are… umm… unlikely seems like it might very well be the understatement of my life. Republicans are demanding that the work done thus far on healthcare be scrapped and that reform should start over from the beginning. (So that we can watch this all happen again until the Republicans are back in the majority in the Senate? I’m exhausted just thinking about it.)

Since the Dems clearly won’t be able to pass a healthcare bill under the traditional method where they need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster, they are considering passing the bill under the reconciliation process. I know, what the heck is the reconciliation process?! Apparently, there is an entirely different process for passing budget related bills which only requires a majority vote to pass a bill. It looks something like this: “The House and Senate pass the budget resolution in the spring of each year. It is a budget blueprint which Congress imposes on itself, and which establishes the rules that limit how much various committees can spend in the legislation they produce. A budget resolution can contain one (or in rare cases, up to three) reconciliation instruction(s). Reconciliation instructions create reconciliation bills.” I’m not sure who this guy is, but he gives a great and complete definition at http://keithhennessey.com/2009/08/05/what-is-reconciliation/.

So, for this reconciliation bill to pass at all the healthcare bill would first have to become a reconciliation bill. Then, the House Democrats would have to approve the Senate version of the bill. And then there’s the minor detail of the underlying shadiness of the whole thing. All I can say is that if the Dems want to go down that road in an election year, they better do a fantastic job of communicating what the heck they’re doing to the public and why it has to be that way.

If you’d like to watch the six hour summit it will be streaming live from http://www.foxnews.com/ and will re-air on CSPAN and CSPAN-2 after the House and Senate adjourn for the day.