The public option: how many of us remember when and why it died?

[BumRushDaShow]

30. There were 2 votes from the House

They had a vote on their own bill in 2009 and then had a 2nd vote on the Senate bill in 2010.

You can't argue unless you DO know "all the nuances".

Any bill dealing with "money" (taxes, budget, etc) MUST originate in the House. The House worked on and passed their own bill - spear-headed by John Dingell, who submitted some version every year, along with Rangell for Ways & Means. At the same time, the Senate worked on and eventually passed it's OWN bill (spear-headed by Kennedy & Baucus for their committees - Health/Labor and Budget).

Because the 2 bills were different, they had to be reconciled, and by then, changes were happening in the Senate while a group of anti-abortion Democrats were massing votes in the House to kill the whole thing.

So the House took the Senate bill from 2009, amended it - without the public option - and barely got it passed (I think the vote was literally 218 - xxx). It went back to the Senate as a differently-named entity, where it now could be filibustered because of Brown. So the nuclear option was pulled out (which the rules at the time in the Senate indicated could only be done ONCE in a year), and the House-amended bill (without public option) was passed, but without needing the 60 votes for passage as a "Budget" bill (which were the rules of the Senate at the time outside of even cloture, which also required 60 votes). I.e., doing it this way allowed Senators to invoke cloture to start the debate but they did not have to vote YAY on the actual bill if they didn't want to (with the assumption that Democrats had at least 51 votes for passage).

Edit to add this fucking drama from back then - http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010/03/white-house-announces-executiv.html

Stupak even wrote an Op Ed in U.S.A. Today a couple weeks ago doubling down - http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/03/11/obamacare-stupak-hobby-lobby-birth-control-column/6264861/

This is part of the "nuance" just trying to get something on the books.