Joe Biden's Frantic Defense of the Status Quo

[betsuni]

175. Al Franken:

"Finally, on Christmas Eve, we passed the bill through the Senate. ... Then, suddenly, things got even harder. In January ... Scott Brown ... won the special election for Ted Kennedy's seat in Massachusetts. ... On top of that, our math problem had just gotten a lot worse, because once Brown took office in early February, that would be the end of our sixty-vote, filibuster-proof supermajority. ... Ordinarily, that wouldn't be a big deal. We'd convene a conference committee, hash out the differences, and then both chambers would vote to pass the unified bill that came out of the conference. But Republicans were still hell bent on stopping us from passing health care reform, and now that they once again had forty-one votes in the Senate, they could stop us from voting on that unified bill. ... There was only one solution: the House would have to pass the exact same bill we had just passed. Guess who didn't like that idea? House Democrats. Liberals wanted provisions from the House's more progressive bill, and Democrats from more conservative districts were now spooked by Brown's victory in Massachusetts. We were stuck. ... Finally, after a few hair-raising weeks of negotiations and arm-twisting, the House passed the Senate bill as it was by a 219-212 margin. We would later be able to make some minor adjustments through a complicated parliamentary procedure called 'reconciliation' which requires only fifty-one votes."