This is encouraging. The Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee passed a health care bill (pdf) this afternoon. You will see the 13-10 vote along party lines and conclude that Republicans are doing their usual obstructionist thing, and you'd be right.
The bipartisan bill includes more than 160 Republican amendments accepted during the month-long mark-up, one of the longest in Congressional history.But despite all those amendments they still couldn't bear to vote for it.
The White House is calling this bipartisan, and I think that's clever.
Emanuel, making a theoretical case for a party-line vote in Congress, offered a definition of bipartisanship based not on roll-call votes but on whether Democrats have accepted Republican ideas during the process of negotiations.That allows for passage with a simple majority if necessary, rather than the 60-vote filibuster-proof majority Republicans and the press seem to think is a requirement.He said Democrats have already passed that test, pointing to Republican amendments that the Democratic-controlled Senate health panel adopted.
“That’s a test of bipartisanship -- whether you took ideas from both parties,” Emanuel said. “At the end of the day, the test isn’t whether they voted for it,” he said, referring to Republicans. “The test is whether the final product represented some of their ideas. And I think it will.”
Good. There's no need to water down the legislation just to get two or three Republican votes when it can be done without them, particularly since we all know that Republicans and their allies and enablers in the insurance and health care industries are going to scream "partisanship" no matter what.
Posted by Linkmeister at July 15, 2009 10:12 AM | TrackBack