Open Congress : Blog

ACORN Suing Federal Government Over Vote in House

2009-11-12T10:47:00Z

In September, the House of Representatives voted to ban funding the community organization Acorn. At the time questions arose as to whether the language stripping Acorn of funds was unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids bills of attainder, legislation targeting one specific individual or organization. Now, Acorn is suing the federal government over the House vote that attached the language to a student loan bill stating that the language amounts to a bill of attainder:

The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn, says that congressional resolution constitutes a “bill of attainder,” or a legislative determination of guilt without a trial. In the suit, Acorn, which came under fire especially from conservative critics after a series of embarrassing scandals, said it was penalized by Congress “without an investigation” and has been forced to slash programs that counsel struggling homeowners, and lay off workers.
…
“It’s a classic trial by the legislature,” said Jules Lobel, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the suit. “They have essentially determined the guilt of the organization and any organization affiliated or allied with it.”

The language that is in question here can be found in this bill (H.R. 3571). This language was attached to H.R. 3221 in a motion to recommit vote.

Public Option "Plan B" In the Works

2009-11-12T00:34:00Z

You’ve probably heard the reports that some Democrats in the Senate — or at least senators who caucus with the Democrats — are threatening to filibuster the health care bill if it contains a public option. Sen. Joseph Lieberman [I, CT], for example, says he’ll join Republicans on a filibuster of a bill that includes a public option and isn’t willing to wiggle on his position. Other Democrats that are not supportive of the public option and have not ruled out filibustering include Sen. Ben Nelson [D, NE], Sen. Evan Bayh [D, IN], Sen. Blanche Lincoln [D, AR] and Sen. Mary Landrieu [D, LA].

Not surprisingly, Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid [D, NV] has a “Plan B” for passing a health care bill if these conservative Democrats do in fact filibuster. Congress Daily tonight gives us a preview of the plan:

Even as Senate Majority Leader Reid seeks votes for a healthcare bill with a public option that states can opt-out of, Reid has allowed Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., to work on what one aide called a “Plan B” if Reid cannot line up 60 votes for cloture.

Carper said he and some other senators, whom he declined to name, are working on an alternative public option if the opt-out falls short.

In states where private insurers fail to offer affordable coverage, Carper said the alternative would permit them to set up a non-profit board, likely appointed by the president, to offer insurance.

“That kind of approach might come close to hitting a sweet spot for a lot of people,” said Carper, noting the approach “addresses concerns about government-owned, government-run.”

At most, this is a sort of ghost of the public option plan. It combines the weakest possible derivatives of the original plan in respect to both its implementation and its operation. Instead of taking effect across the board, it would getting “triggered” only in states that don’t cross a certain “affordability” threshold for insurance plans. Instead of being a robust, national government-run program with the economy of scale to sell insurance at below market rates and drive down costs, it would be a series of small, state-based, private non-profits.

It takes Sen. Olympia Snowe’s [R, ME] “trigger” and Sen. Kent Conrad’s [D, ND] “co-ops,” and combines them to make a plan that probably would never take effect, and if it dis, wouldn’t actually do anything. This is the absolute weakest possible derivative of the public option that anyone could say, with a straight face, has its roots in the public option idea.

Reid and Carper know their idea is absurdly weak; that’s why they have been trying to keep it secret:

The Democratic aide said staffers have tried to keep Carper’s alternative quiet due to concerns that publicity could draw attacks from liberal activists, which could complicate efforts to line up support from the full Democratic caucus.

It’s hard to imagine that Reid and Carper even mean this is a serious policy proposal. To me, it seems like a plan to keep at least a memory of the public option alive in the Senate’s health care bill. If they can’t pass the public option, this would serve as a kind of place holder in the Senate’s bill for where the public option would go if it were there. That might be enough to keep the House-Senate conference committee negotiations revolving around the question of “what kind of public option” to include in the final bill rather than whether or not to include any kind of public option at all.

Coburn Blocking Veterans Benefits Bill

2009-11-11T19:15:00Z

It’s Veterans Day, and, appropriately, the Senate has been trying to finalize their work on a bill to improve health care for veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a summary prepared by the Democrats, the bill would “provide a stipend and other support for caregivers of severely wounded veterans, improve health care offered by the government, expand service for those in rural areas, ensure equal access to female veterans and address homelessness among veterans,” according to Jim Myers of Tulsa World.

The bill is called the Caregivers and Veterans Omnibus Health Services Act, and it is being held up in the Senate over the objections of a single Republican — Sen. Thomas Coburn [R, OK].

Coburn has a hold on the bill because it would spend $3.7 billion on the caregiver stipends without specifically designated a mechanism for the government to recoup the money. He has distributed a document outlining his recommendation for “wasteful, duplicative and obsolete” government programs that he thinks should be eliminated to pay for the cost of the bill’s services to veterans.

This kind of appeal is nothing new for Coburn and it doesn’t really mean that he wants to prevent these services from going to the veterans who need them. Indeed, on his website he writes that he supports many of the goals of the bill. This is an example of his own personal principles rubbing up, awkwardly, against policy that most consider to be good on its own merits.

For the past several years, Cobun has been on a crusade against any legislation that doesn’t meet his criteria for fiscal responsiblity. At the beginning of the last session of Congress, Coburn outlined the criteria he would use for deciding whether or not to put a hold on legislation in a letter (pdf) to his Senate colleagues. He listed four principles against with he would judge bills — 1) no duplicative programs, 2) no un-offset spending, 3) no increases of government funding for a program that also receives private funds and 4) no sustaining funds for cultural institutions.

In addition to his concerns over spending in the bill that is not offset, Coburn has another qualm with the bill that is actually not covered in his list of principles. The bill “discriminates against Vietnam veterans, Gulf War I veterans, and World War II veterans, all of whom are excluded from this program,” he writes.

The Senate will continue work on the bill on Monday when they return from the Veteran’s Day recess. The Senate Democrat’s calendar shows that a vote on a Coburn amendment to the bill is scheduled to take place on Monday afternoon.

A Merged Senate Bill by Monday?

2009-11-10T14:42:00Z

Democratic leaders in the Senate are now planning on having a health care bill on the Senate floor by next Monday, much sooner than anyone had been expecting.

As it stands, the public has access to the health care bills as passed by the Senate Finance Committee (S. 1796) and the Senate HELP Committee (S. 1679), but not to the merged version that will be brought to the floor for debate and votes. The merged version does in fact exist, however, and it’s currently being examined by the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is expected to report their findings by the end of this week or Monday of next week. If their findings are to Senate Dems’ likings, the bill will be made available to the public on Monday.

What does this mean for the bill’s transparency? Basically, it means that if all goes according to the Senate Democratic leadership’s schedule, the first vote on the bill could occur just hours after the text and details of it are made available to the public. Senate Republicans and Democrats outside of the leadership would likely not have much more time than the rest of us to read the bill before they vote.

The reason, I assume, that the Senate feels they can justify this pace is that the vote that would be taking on Monday would not technically be a vote on the bill. It wouldn’t even be a vote on beginning the debate of the bill. It would be on a motion to invoke cloture on a motion to proceed to the debate. In other words, it would be a vote to overcome a Republican filibuster of even considering debating the bill. If that motion is approved — it would take 60 votes — the Senate would proceed to 30 clock hours of debating whether or not to begin the actual debate of the bill. Once those 30 hours are up, the Senate would then take another vote, requiring a simple majority of 51 votes, to begin the official debate. All of this would likely take until Thursday to pass. By that point, if the bill is in fact made public on Monday, it will have been officially available online for 72 hours before debate begins, just like it was in the House.

In reality, however, the vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed is not just procedural. It often has substantial implications. If some Democrat disliked the bill so much that they didn’t even want it debated on the floor, they could join with the Republicans on the motion and block it. Right now, that’s not expected to happen, but neither is it expected to be a pleasant, bipartisan event. It’s a little bit like “agreeing to the rule” in the House, which was a partisan vote that was held captive by conservative Democrats to force a vote on changing abortion language in the bill. Sen. Ben Nelson [D, NE] is already threatening to vote against the motion to proceed if it doesn’t contain language similar to the abortion funding amendment the House added to their bill.

We’ll be working to get you the full text of the merged Senate bill online as soon as possible. For now, here’s an overview of some of the big differences between the Finance Committee and HELP Committee bills. These are some of the things we’ll be looking at as soon as the merged bill is available to see what the Dem leadership has decided. With the passage of the Stupak abortion amendment in the House this past weekend, we’ll also be looking for what changes, if any, Senate Democrats make to their bills’ abortion language. Subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed for updates.

As for the broader health care timeline in the Senate, we’re probably looking at at least three weeks of debate and potentially a final vote before Christmas. Passage of the bill still seems shaky, and you can be sure that anything that comes out of the Senate will look significantly different from the bill that was passed by the House last Saturday.

UPDATE: Contradicting all the earlier reports, Congress Daily ($) is reporting that there may be a bill on Monday, but there probably won’t be a vote:

Top Senate Democrats plan to start debate on a healthcare overhaul bill next week, but they said today a key vote on a motion to proceed to the bill might not occur until after Thanksgiving and that final passage might not come this year.

[…]

“Boy, that would be terrific, if we could get a motion to proceed” before the holiday, Durbin said.

Durbin said Reid is working to assure that 60 senators commit to initially vote to cut off a GOP filibuster on the motion to proceed, and Democrats will not move if they are not sure of the votes. Democrats remain focused on securing commitments to move to the bill, betting that changes on the floor can win over holdouts, he said.

“What we are aiming for is for people to … understand what’s in the bill and commit to moving forward with the debate,” Durbin said. “That is what the motion to proceed is all about. No final commitment has been made on passage, obviously, until people have a chance to review it carefully. And clearly we’re going to make some changes.”

A Public Option, Stupak Amendment Trade-Off?

2009-11-10T12:10:00Z

David Waldman sees it in the range of possibilities:

As Marcy Wheeler theorized in an e-mail exchange, so long as the Senate side dynamics still appear to revolve around Olympia Snowe (R-ME). Snowe’s both pro-choice and an opponent of the public option. So it makes for a great play: win Snowe’s support, win the thanks of progressives who are at least picking up hints about the removal of the Stupak language in conference, and be rid of the public option and the nascent but pesky progressive bloc that had begun to coalesce around it.

Sen. Olympia Snowe [R, ME] has a zero percent rating from the National Right to Life Committee, meaning she is about as pro-choice as the most pro-choice Democrat in Congress. And we’ve known all along that she is staunchly opposed to any variation of the public option beyond her “trigger” proposal to set up public plans in states that don’t achieve a certain “affordability” threshold. But I wonder if new polling that shows Snowe getting crushed against a generic Republican in the 2012 primary by a 59% – 31% margin will ultimately dissuade her from looking for a way to cast a vote for the Democrats’ health care bill.

Btw, I highly recommend Waldman’s whole post on the health care fight so far, and what to watch going forward. He makes a strong case that the progressive position in the health care bill has been defended much better by netroots activists than it has by the traditional, insider advocacy groups

Next Steps for the Stupak Abortion Amendment

2009-11-09T14:12:00Z

The House’s passage of the health care bill on Saturday was a big deal, but it was mostly expected. The real new is the Stupak abortion amendment that was tacked onto the bill by conservative Democrats to block anyone using government subsidies to buy insurance from buying a plan that covers abortions, even if the abortion coverage is paid for completely with private premiums. Pro-choice activists are calling it a monumental setback for abortion access.

The Democratic leadership decided to allow a vote on the amendment after a group of about 40 pro-life Democrats threatened to derail the whole health care bill. It was approved by a vote of 240-194, with 64 Democrats joining every single House Republican voting in favor.

The issue now moves to the Senate. Both of the health care reform bills that currently exist in the Senate deal with the abortion issue the same way that the House bill did before it was changed by the Stupak amendment. They both require government-provided “affordability credits” to be segregated from individually paid premiums so that they can ensure that federal funds are not used for abortion coverage. The bills direct the Health Choices Commissioner to determine, on an actuarial basis, the average cost of abortion coverage, and would only allow people using “affordability credits” to buy a plan that covers abortions if they are paying for enough of the plan with their own money to fully cover the cost of the abortion coverage portion. This arrangement basically maintains the status quo by neither requiring nor banning private insurers from offering abortion coverage as long as it isn’t being financed with federal money.

But the New York Times is reporting that some Democrats in the Senate are now pushing to add the Stupak amendment to their bill. The Times names Sen. Bob Casey [D, PA] and Sen. Ben Nelson [D, NE] as being behind the push, adding that “senior Senate Democratic aides said the outcome was too close to call.”

A further indication that the Stupak amendment may be added to the Senate bill came from Sen. Claire McCaskill [D, MO] today who said she didn’t think the Stupak amendment would cause the bill to fail. “Obviously, I have been a pro-choice candidate for my entire political career, and obviously there is controversy always surrounding this issue. But we are talking about whether or not people that get public money can buy an insurance policy that has a coverage for abortion. And that is not the majority of America. The majority of America is not going to be getting subsidies from the government,” she said.

The Stupak amendment’s best chance for inclusion in the Senate bill is for it to be added to the merged bill that will be brought to the floor by Senate Democratic leaders for debate. If it were presented as a floor amendment, it would be filibustered by the Democrats and would require 20 Democrats to break from their party and vote with the Republicans to get it passed. There almost certainly are not 20 Democrats in the Senate who support amendment. If it’s included in the underlying bill, it likely would not cause any liberal Democrats to vote “no” on passing the whole bill. It didn’t lose any Democratic votes for the bill in the House.

Despite all the signs that the Stupak amendment will be included in the health care bills that pass both the Senate and the House bill, there are also signs that it could be stripped in the final blended bill. House chief deputy whip Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz [D, FL-20] said today that she was “confident” it would be taken out by the conference committee. The final blended version that is produced by the conference committee will need to be approved once again by both the Senate and the House.

Forty-one House Democrats sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [D, CA-8] this morning pledging to vote against the final health care bill if it includes the amendment — enough to cause the bill to fail. “[The Stupak amendment] represents an unprecedented and unacceptable restriction on women’s ability to access the full range of reproductive health services to which they are lawfully entitled,” they wrote in the letter. “We will not vote for a conference report that contains language that restricts women’s right to choose any further than current law.”

UPDATE: President Obama weighed in on the issue Monday night:

“I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,” Obama said. “And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”

Saying the bill cannot change the status quo regarding the ban on federal funding for abortions, the President said, “there are strong feelings on both sides” about an amendment passed Saturday and added to the legislation, “and what that tells me is that there needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo.”

[…]

“I want to make sure that the provision that emerges meets that test — that we are not in some way sneaking in funding for abortions, but, on the other hand, that we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices,” he said.

House Passes Historic Health Care Bill

2009-11-08T01:31:00Z

The House of Representatives on Saturday night approved landmark legislation designed to accomplish President Obama’s goals of reducing health care costs, increasing choices for consumers and guaranteeing access to quality, affordable insurance for all Americans. The final vote tally was 220-215. Thirty-nine Democrats broke with their party to vote against the bill, and only one Republican, Rep. Anh Cao [R, LA-2], voted in favor.

Previous Congresses and Administrations have tried several times over the past 40 years to revamp the U.S. health care system, but they have never come this far. The bill passed in the House represents the biggest change to the health care system and the biggest expansion in coverage since Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.

The bill’s passage was secured in large part by a vote that took place earlier in the evening on an amendment from Rep. Bart Stupak [D, MI-1] to strengthen language in the bill banning the use of federal funds for abortions. The amendment, which was approved by a vote of 240-194, essentially restricts all low and middle-income people purchasing insurance with federal subsidies from buying a plan that covers abortions besides those resulting from rape or incest, or in cases where the mother’s life is endangered. A bloc of about forty conservative Democrats had been threatening for weeks to vote en masse to kill the bill if they weren’t allowed to vote on Stupak’s amendment.

President Obama also threw his full support behind the bill today in a plea to help House Democrats round up the final few votes they needed to get it passed. Speaking to the full House Democratic Caucus but gearing his remarks towards conservative Democrats, Obama said that voting against the bill wouldn’t protect them from partisan attacks. “None of you can expect the Republicans not to go after you if you vote against this bill,” Obama said at the meeting according to Rep. Henry Waxman [D, CA-30]. “They want this bill to go down for their own partisan reasons.”

The bill – known as the Affordable Health Care for America Act – seeks to expand health care coverage to the approximately 40 million Americans who are currently uninsured by lowering the cost of health care and making the system more efficient. To that end, it includes a new government-run insurance plan to compete with the private companies, a requirement that all Americans have health insurance, a ban on denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition and, to pay for it all, a surtax on individuals with incomes above $500,000. More thorough summaries of the bill can be found here.

The Senate is still weeks away from beginning debate on their own health care bill. The final details of their bill are still being negotiated, but whatever bill comes out of the Senate will be more conservative than the House’s bill in several ways. It is not clear that the Senate bill will end up containing a public option, and if it does, unlike the House bill it will allow individual states to opt out of offering it to their residents. The Senate’s bill will also provide fewer subsidies to help low and middle-income people buy insurance, and it will not include a surtax on the rich to offset its new spending.

The abortion issue that threatened to bring down the House bill so far has not been a problem in the Senate. Pro-choice Democrats are hoping to keep the Senate’s bill containing language that would allow people to use affordability credits to buy insurance that covers abortions, provided that the abortion part of the plan is fully paid for by individual premiums. The Senate language would then have to be reconciled with the House’s more conservative language by a joint-chamber conference committee that would be in charge of producing a final, merged bill. The final version will need one more vote from each chamber before it can be sent to President Obama to be signed into law.

Pro-Lifers Win on Abortion Issue -- House Expected to Pass Health Care Reform Today

2009-11-07T07:28:00Z

The House Rules Committee met from 2 p.m. until 1 in the morning on Friday to strike a deal on the health care debate that will take place in the House today. Though the health care bill is 2,000 pages long and overhaul’s one-sixth of the nation’s economy, the committee’s epic session revolved around just one thing: abortion.

The Democrats’ biggest threat to passing their health care bill comes from one of their own. Pro-life Rep. Bart Stupak [D, MI-1] says he has commitments from about 40 other Democrats to vote against the bill unless it’s language restricting the use of federal funds for abortions is amended and strengthened. With every single Republican expected to vote against the bill, Stupak’s pro-life bloc holds enough leverage to kill the bill. They have been threatening to vote against the “rule” governing the floor debate, effectively blocking the debate from beginning, if they are not allowed a floor vote on their amendment.

In the beginning of the day on Friday, the Rules Committee, which is basically an extension of the Democratic leadership, had several options on the table yesterday for resolving the abortion problem. But when the most promising compromise language on the issue was withdrawn by its sponsor, Rep. Brad Ellsworth [D, IN-8], they were left with only three options — add Stupak’s abortion amendment to the bill, call his bluff on voting down the “rule,” or let him have a floor vote on his amendment.

In the end, the leadership decided to give him a floor vote on his amendment. They hope that whether or not the amendment passes, the Democratic caucus will come together in the end to vote in favor of the bill on final passage. In other words, if the amendment fails, the fact that the leadership allowed it to happen might be enough to win votes from some of the 40 pro-life Democrats. And if it is adopted, pro-choice Democrats who oppose the amendment will likely still vote for the bill so as to not stand in the way of health care reform. (For a more detailed report on how the Rules Committee came to allow a vote on Stupak’s amendment, see Ryan Grim’s reporting.)

Senior Democrats believe the deal to allow a vote on the abortion amendment secure the votes needed to pass the health care bill. “You don’t go to the floor unless you’re there — and we’re there,” Rep. John Larson [D, CT-1] told the L.A. Times.

The Stupak Abortion Amendment

The amendment, which you can download and read in full here, would do three things.

First, it would codify the Hyde Amendment provisions in the bill so that the ban on federal funds being used for abortions besides those resulting from rape or incest, or in cases where the mother’s life is endangered would remain intact regardless of Hyde being reauthorized. As it’s currently written, the bill’s restrictions on the use of federal funds for abortion coverage would end if the Hyde Amendment, which has been reauthorized by Congress on an annual basis since 1976, is not reauthorized.

Secondly, it would not allow individuals purchasing insurance at least in part with federal affordability credits to buy a plan that covers abortions. The bill as currently written would allow individuals to use affordability credits to buy insurance that includes abortion coverage, but it requires any such plan to segregate the credits from individual premium payments and ensure that only the premium payments are used to fund the abortion services portion of the plan.

Affordability credits are available under the bill to people who don’t get insurance from work and earn between 150% and 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. The Stupak amendment would bar all people in this income bracket from purchasing insurance that covers elective abortions unless they can afford to pay for a separate abortion coverage plan on their own. People earning below 150% of FPL would already be ineligible for abortion coverage because they will be on Medicaid, which does not cover abortions under Hyde. There are no concrete numbers for how many people would be denied an abortion-coverage option under the amendment, but it would likely be at least 20 million.

Thirdly, the Stupak amendment would dictate that the government-run public option does not provide abortion coverage. The bill currently leaves the decision of abortion coverage in the public option up to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Allowing the public option to cover abortions would not violate the Hyde Amendment because the public option is not government funded; will be entirely financed by individual premiums, just like the private plans.

Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee has called today’s vote on the Stupak amendment the most important abortion vote in Congress since Roe.

Planned Parenthood says the amendment would be a discriminatory abortion ban. “This amendment would violate the spirit of health care reform, which is meant to guarantee quality, affordable health care coverage for all, by creating a two-tiered system that would punish women, particularly those with low and modest incomes,” said Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood.

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Countdown to the House Health Care Vote

2009-11-06T14:14:00Z

It’s now just one day before the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on their bill to overhaul the health care system (H.R. 3962). Here’s a rundown of where things stand at this moment.

The Votes

The Democrats need a simple majority of 218 votes to pass the bill. This morning, House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer [D, MD-5] said they they didn’t quite have all the votes lined up yet, but that they were “very close.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi [D, CA-8] said confidently that she “will” have the votes lined up by Saturday. Take her seriously on this — in her three years as Speaker, she has only lost on one major vote (the Wall Street bailout bill). She’s been in the situation of scrounging up votes from wavering Democrats at the last minute many times, but when the votes get tallied she always seems to prevail.

Forty House Democrats are threatening to vote against the bill unless its provisions banning federal funding for abortions are strengthened. That’s just about enough to sink the bill. Add to that the fact that a handful of conservative Democrats are opposing the bill flat-out and it becomes clear that Pelosi will have to do more than peel off a few of the 40 pro-life Dems with arm-twisting and earmarks.

The Bill

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to meet today at 2 p.m. ET to determine the rules that will govern the health care floor debate and vote. They’ll decide what, if any, amendments will be voted on as well as any last-minute changes that will be made to the bill. The Rules Committee is generally considered an extension of the Democratic leadership, so any changes or amendments that are agreed to by the committee today will be done at the behest of the leadership in order to win over on-the-fence Democrats.

You can read all of the amendments that have been submitted to the committee here.

Adoption of the 42-page Manager’s Amendment that was released on Wednesday will be included in the “rule” that the Rules Committee decides on today.

It is likely that they will add some new language to the bill’s provisions on abortion funding. Igor Volsky at the Wonk Room has a very handy chart showing the current bill’s abortion provisions and a couple possible changes that have been floated by pro-life Democrats. There are basically two proposals — 1) prevent all middle and low-income people buying insurance with affordability credits to buy plans that cover elective abortions, and 2) tweak the bill’s language regarding the segregation of funds that would keep federal funds separate from the individually paid premiums that could be used for abortion coverage. If the Dem leadership determines that the latter option is enough to win over some of the 40 Democrats with concerns over the bill’s abortion provisions, that language will likely be included in the underlying bill that comes to the floor by the Rules Committee.

On this issue of floor amendments, it looks like the only one that will be voted on is the Republican substitute. Given its dismal score from the CBO, that likely will not attract any Democratic support and is not really a viable amendment. Rep. Anthony Weiner [D, NY-9] has dropped his demand that the full House votes on his amendment to replace the bill with a single-payer system that is supported by progressives. The House leadership has called Weiner’s choice to withdraw his amendment “enormously helpful in passing the health care reform package.”

The full text of the bill as it currently stands can be read here on OpenCongress.

The Debate

The House’s floor debate is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. ET. The first matter of business will be a vote on the “rule” that will govern the debate. This might contain some new changes to the bill (we’ll report as soon as we know). If it doesn’t change the bill’s abortion provisions, pro-life Democrats are threatening to vote against the “rule,” potentially ending the floor debate and sending the bill back to the Rules Committee. However, with the two new House Democrats that are being sworn in today, the 40 Dems that have problems with the bill’s abortion provisions might no longer have the numbers to bring down the rule.

Once the rule is approved, the Democratic leadership is planning on genera floor debate, including a vote on the Republican substitute, to last until 6 or 7 p.m., at which time the House will take a final vote.

But, as Hoyer admitted this morning, this timeline is likely to be extended. Republicans are readying some dilatory tactics and the debate could be extended into Sunday or even next week.

Before the debate is over the Republicans will have one last chance to kill the bill through a motion to recommit. A motion to recommit is basically a procedural vote that allows the minority party one final chance before final passage to request that the bill is amended. The language of motions to recommit are generally not released to the public beforehand and they are only given a few minutes of floor debate.

If the Republicans put language regarding abortion coverage in their motion to recommit, they could potentially pick off enough Democrats to pass the motion. But any abortion language beyond what the Democratic leadership decides to include through the Rules Committee would likely have the effect of a “poison pill” and cause the overall bill to fail once a final vote is taken.

Debunking John Boehner's "Monthly Abortion Premium" Claim (By Reading the Bill)

2009-11-05T14:52:00Z

The Drudge Report is leading off today with an outrageous and false claim about the House health care bill from House Minority Leader John Boehner [R, OH-8]. “A monthly abortion premium will be charged of all enrollees in the government-run plan,” Boehner writes. It’s right there on line 16, page 96, section 213, under ‘Insurance Rating Rules.’ The premium will be paid into a U.S. Treasury account – and these federal funds will be used to pay for the abortion services."

But Boehner is either lying or completely misunderstanding what that section of the bill is all about. In fact, the section of the bill he is claiming would require a “monthly abortion premium” is actually part of a safeguard in the bill to ensure that no federal money is used for funding abortions.

The section, which you can read for yourself here, directs the Health Choices Commissioner to determine, on an actuarial basis, the per month cost of insurance coverage for elective abortions. The reason the government needs this information is because the bill requires federally-funded affordability credits to be segregated from individually-paid premiums for any insurance plan that covers elective abortions and is paid for in part by affordability credits. The government needs to know how much the abortion coverage portion of the plan costs so they can ensure that that that potion of the plan is fully paid for by private individuals, not by the government.

Read the section of the bill on segregating these funds here; you’ll see that it references the section directing the Commissioner to estimate the cost of abortion coverage. There is absolutely nothing in the section or anywhere else in the bill that says anything abortion premiums.

Boehner also makes another false claim in his article. “On line 17, p. 110, section 222, under ‘Abortions for which Public Funding is Allowed,’ the Health and Human Services Secretary is given the authority to determine when abortion is allowed under the government-run plan,” he writes.

This, also, is not true in any way. Read the actual text of that section:

(B) ABORTIONS FOR WHICH PUBLIC FUNDING IS ALLOWED- The services described in this subparagraph are abortions for which the expenditure of Federal funds appropriated for the Department of Health and Human Services is permitted, based on the law as in effect as of the date that is 6 months before the beginning of the plan year involved.

Under current law, the Secretary of Health and Human Services does not have any authority to determine what abortions can be paid for with federal funds. That authority belongs to Congress. Since 1976, Congress has passed a law every year (the Hyde Amendment) that bans federal funds from being used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or when the life of the mother is at risk. This is the law being referenced in the section of the health care bill Boehner refers to in his article. It is fully upheld by the House health care bill. Congress would have to end the Hyde Amendment in order for any decisions regarding federal funds for abortions to be given to the HHS Secretary, as Boehner falsely claims.