Dealing With The Blue Dogs

The big story this morning is last night's deal with the Blue Dogs to strip any and all abortion funding from the House health care reform measure. Today's vote will indeed continue, but Nancy Pelosi has been forced to allow an amendment vote to block not only the public option from being used to pay for abortions, but from any insurance plan offered in the so called health insurance exchange. As Steve Benen reports, Pelosi had no choice.

The House Democratic leadership didn't want to go this route, but was out of options -- they just couldn't get to 218.

The idea, at this point, is to allow a vote on the amendment. Pro-choice Dems can register their opposition, but the amendment is expected to have the votes pass.

And that's when this might get a little trickier. If the Stupak/Ellsworth amendment is approved, Democrats who've withheld their support over this issue will throw their support to the larger reform bill. The angle to keep an eye on, however, is what happens to the strong, pro-choice leaders in the caucus -- will they switch sides and vote to kill the bill?

Most of the vote counts I've seen put the number of hard "no" votes in the Democratic caucus at 25. The majority can lose no more than 40. The vote is still expected for tonight, with top White House officials and cabinet sectaries working the phones and walking the halls of Congress, keeping the heat on wavering members.

On one hand, most private health insurance plans offered through the workplace simply don't cover abortions to begin with. Mine doesn't, for example. There's also a raft of state laws and limited doctors who will perform the procedure that make getting an abortion nearly impossible anyway no matter what the public option says.

On the other hand, the Dems are better people than to be misogynist assholes. The reality is this: Will the Blue Dogs who vote for the anti-abortion amendment vote for the House bill at the final vote?

I'm thinking no. If the measure dies in the House due to the abortion measure, well, there's no way anyone will ever touch health care reform in the future. Nancy just may have dealt herself into a corner, and the Blue Dogs may just end up putting the Dems out of business in 2010.

Hasn't anyone on Capitol Hill figured out that the reason the Republicans won in 1994 was because Democrats killed Clinton's health care reform?

[UPDATE 12:35 PM] BooMan argues that the price of getting this through the House is to throw women under the bus, and that the Stupak amendment is the de facto end of abortion coverage in America.

There will be a vote on the Stupak Amendment after all. And, no doubt, that amendment will pass. Private insurers will have to drop abortion coverage from plans that have it (which is most of them) in order to participate in the exchanges. The Public Option will not provide abortion coverage. People will get access to affordable health care, but they'll have to pay out of pocket for an abortion. If people want to move to a plan on the exchange, they'll lose the coverage that they currently have.

There is no guarantee that this language will survive the Conference Committee and become law, but it won't be easy to pass the Conference Report if it doesn't have the language. Once people vote for something once, they tend to get irritated if you just ignore that and remove it.

I didn't realize that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops was a political party with elected officials in Congress. Now I know.

I have a difficult time arguing that he's wrong. I can understand the public option being banned from having abortion coverage, but banning any private insurance plan participating in the health insurance exchange will basically put a functional end to abortions being covered under insurance, period.

That's something I would expect from the GOP, but apparently that's the price of the Democrats as well.