By John Brummett
When most of your state’s congressmen are quitting and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is preparing to take another shot at health care reform needing every vote she can find, you’d do well to check the temperature of your lame ducks.
You need to determine if they are still where they were on the last vote, a close one in November, before they were lame.
They aren’t.
Well, cranky and departing U.S. Rep. Marion Berry isn’t. Everyone else looks status quo. But one vote could be huge.
Last time, needing 218 votes, Pelosi rounded up 220, including two soft votes from now-retiring Arkansas Democrats. Vic Snyder, never enamored of the public option that was in the bill, gave her a vote. So did Berry.
Mike Ross, leading Blue Dog, said “no,” as, of course, did our lone Republican, John Boozman.
Now Democrats will take one last stab. This is the plan: Pelosi will try to pass a more moderate Senate bill, which has no public option. But the House would do so only on the solemn Senate promise then to amend the bill to make a few changes desired by President Obama and required by the House. It would do so using the budget reconciliation process, thus needing only a simple majority of 51 votes, not 60 to break a filibuster.
Boozman is still “no,” of course, since that’s all Republicans say anymore.
Ross, our only delegate seeking to stay in the House, tells me he remains “no,” even though the public option is gone from the Senate bill. He says the entire process has been “tainted” by political misplays and that 75 percent of his constituents are opposed. The Democrats have been “out-messaged” by the Republicans, Ross says.
Snyder can be presumed to be supportive again, provided these Senate-related contingencies can be accomplished. He says he wants to see words and numbers on paper before he says for sure, understandably.
Snyder says the need for reform grows daily. The latest dire development, he explains, is that healthy young people are bailing out of the Blue Cross plan in California, owing to massive premium increases, leaving an actuarially untenable preponderance of older and sicker people.
Then there’s Berry.
It turns out he is among 11 conservative anti-abortion House Democrats who voted for the House bill in November only after Pelosi agreed, most grudgingly, to the “Stupak Amendment.” It provided that no health insurer providing federally subsidized coverage through new health insurance exchanges could cover abortions, even with private money separate from subsidized coverage.
The Senate toned that down, saying no federally subsidized coverage could extend to abortions, which is illegal already under the Hyde Amendment, but that insurance companies participating in the publicly subsidized exchange could otherwise sell private insurance paid entirely by private funds that would cover abortion.
“I think abortion’s wrong,” Berry told me Friday morning. “The problem is that I’ve lived too long. When they say they can keep this money separate, I just don’t believe it.”
Those other 10 Stupak-contingent votes also are leaning “no” this time. So, if you take 11 votes from 220, you have 209. That doesn’t pass the bill.
But Berry tells me, just as Ross told me the day before, that Pelosi will probably get her majority — which, owing to vacancies, is now 216.
How in the world could she do that? Well, they don’t know and can’t say. They just think Pelosi will get it done.
Berry is long on record extolling her legislative skills.
“You know, when this is over,” Berry says, “this whole thing is going to be something they’ll be studying for history for hundreds of years.”
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
