So, when members of the Senate and the House come back to The Hill on September 8, 2009 from their August recess, the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate can gavel in, call a vote on a health care bill, pass it, and send it to the President for signature before the subway drivers who take the Senators from the Capitol Building back to the Senate office buildings can break for lunch.
Please refer to my April 28 blog for more details on this, but the D's don't need 1 R vote to pass this bill, exactly as they want it. Just call the vote, and hand President Obama and the Democratic Party the victory on health care reform they have been hoping for since President Clinton breathed life into the issue back in the 90s.
Will they call the vote?
If not, why not?
These are rhetorical questions, of course. Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves, but I don't think they will.
I've long thought that good policy makes good politics (see my Feb 26 entry). In this case, if the health care reform the D's are proposing is such good policy, it may take a while for the citizenry to comprehend the goodness of it, but the voters will come around. That being the case, the D's, while perhaps initially taking a beating in the popularity polls (given the August Health Care Town Hall melees - yes, I'm using a French word), will eventually be held as heros of the American people.
So, if the D's truly believe this is good policy, why not go ahead and pass it, temporary bad polls be damned?
We shall see.
I still think they should go with the Wyden/Bennett plan referred to in my blog of June 12.
