It happened under the cloak of darkness, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., got the 60 votes he needed to get the health care bill on the agenda for a full Senate vote.
It took a lot of wheeling and dealing, not to mention a couple of special deals to set the package up for a vote at around 1 a.m. Dec. 21. The $871 billion bill should come up for a formal vote by Christmas.
It goes without saying this bill has its admirers and detractors, all of who have made their opinions extremely well known in the past few months. But there’s more.
The bill now goes to a conference committee, which must find a way to iron out all the differences between it and the version passed by the House of Representatives.
It’s not gonna be easy.
One of the Republicans the Democrats courted was Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who went against her fellow GOPers to vote for it in the finance committee. However Snowe said on “Face the Nation” she was going to vote against the final package, which she did.
The American people still have a lot of questions, Snowe said.
“As they’re sitting around their kitchen tables, they’re expecting answers to certain questions,” Snowe said. “We don’t have the answers to those questions.”
Key among those will be the effects of the bill on the economy, one reason the Senate should “hold off” on getting the bill through.
Snow praised President Barack Obama for his grasp of the issue, but added “the process is too fast.”
One thing for sure is that this bill is the result of compromise upon compromise, and whatever final version that emerges from the conference committee will be comprised of even more compromises.
But that’s also been the history of much of the legislation that’s passed Congress in the more than 220 years it’s been operating. Some of that’s been good, some has been bad.
But this does seem like a rush job. Another talking head yesterday, I think it was Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, said presidents have tried and failed over 40 years to pass comprehensive health care legislation.
That’s a long-time, and frankly, it escapes me why we can’t wait just a little longer. The American people need good explanations when it comes to such massive, history making legislation. They deserve, as Sen. Snowe said, to have some answers.
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Washington, D.C., wasn’t the only place that was getting snow, literally and figuratively, over the weekend. Kent County got socked pretty hard, to say the least. After shoveling ourselves out yesterday, with the aid of our neighbor, Norm Wilkerson, who brought out his front loader, we made it into town. There we saw many people, just like Norm, who apparently were helping others clear sidewalks and driveways.
That’s one of the best examples of neighborliness I’ve seen in quite a while.
