"Senate Progressive Dems on HCR"

mcjoan:

At yesterday's Progressive Media Summit with members of the Senate Democratic caucus, Chuck Schumer, Debbie Stabenow, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders fielded some tough questions and mutual frustration from said progressive media members over the reform process.

First, in answer to a somewhat convoluted question from Ed Schultz about why the House wasn't just going to have to pass the bill, Schumer deflected back to the reality that the bill as it stands now--with the Nebraska deal et al.--won't cut it, and gave a really decent answer on precisely why the House has good reason to be distrustful of the Senate.

He talked about some of the very difficult votes that the House has had to take over the last year, only to watch in frustration as some really hard votes go to the Senate to die. His answer made it clear that leadership in the House, Senate, and White House are all on board with finding a mechanism that will lock 50 Senators in to supporting a reconciliation fix that will get 218 votes in the House.

More on the background of the process, Sanders gave a "lessons learned" sort of retrospective look at where we are, and who we got here, saying the "process of moving hcr has not been has efficient or effective as it might have been," and then detailing the deficiencies. First, by not having single payer on the table, which sent a message to progressives that they weren't going to be heard. He talked most forcefully about what he called the "major error" that existed, the "assumption that we had 59 or 60 votes.... We spent month after month after month negotiating with people who weren't going to support the bill." Sam Stein, who attended the event, has more.

Brown reiterated his support for the public option, and echoed one of the primary themes for the hcr discussion, that reconciliation is not an extraordinary process, and did some cheerleading to try to push progressive media through the rest of the process, saying that "all of us want more out of this healthcare bill," and continuing "I know that a lot of you are discouraged about what has happened in the last year. Discouraged that the conservative, moderate wing of the Democratic Party too often seems to holds sway over both caucuses."

I asked Stabenow whether the Senate progressives were involved in the strategy for dealing with Stupak, and she said that they were, and that there was no way that the Stupak language could pass in the Senate--hence the Nelson language. Given that Stupak says that he refuses to accept the Nelson language, the impasse continues