Yuval Levin at NRO clarifies a bit of confusion that surrounds the current debate over what's called "Obamacare." The House of Representatives is going to vote in a couple of weeks on the bill passed by the Senate on Christmas eve. If the House approves it, it will go directly to the President's desk to be signed into law. All the talk about the bill going back to the Senate for a reconciliation vote is something of a red herring. There will be no need for reconciliation if the House passes this bill because it's the same bill the Senate has already approved:
It's worth reiterating something [others] have pointed out: The focus on reconciliation in the past few days confuses things a bit. The question in the health-care debate at the moment is whether Nancy Pelosi can get enough of her members to vote for the version of Obamacare that passed the Senate late last year. If the House passes that bill, it will have passed both houses, will go to the president, and will become law.
Some liberal House Democrats have problems with that bill - especially with some of its tax provisions, though also a few other things. So to get some of their votes, the leadership is now telling them that if they vote for the Senate bill, the House could then pass another bill that amends the Senate bill to fix some of what they don't like about it. The Senate could then pass that amendment bill by reconciliation and it would also become law, and so the sum of the two laws would be closer to what they want.
But that amending bill wouldn't change the basic character of what would be enacted (and to the extent it would change it at the edges, it would be mostly for the worse): Either way, if the House passes the Senate bill then Obamacare would become law, complete with its massive, overbearing, costly, intrusive, inefficient, and clumsy combination of mandates, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and new government programs intended to replace the American health-insurance industry with an enormous federal entitlement while failing to address the problem of costs. Just about everything the public hates about the bill is in both versions. The prospect of reconciliation is just one of the means that the Democratic leadership is employing to persuade members of the House to ignore the public's wishes and their own political future and enact Obamacare.
In other words, any House Democrats who vote for the Senate bill thinking that the Senate will then revisit it to make it more palatable to them, are deluding themselves. Once the House passes this bill there'll be no need for the Senate to do anything. It'll be law.
This puts House Dems who don't want to buck their party but who do want changes made to the bill in the position of having to either vote against the bill, and keep it from becoming law in its present form, or vote for it and trust Obama and the Democratic senators to keep their word that they'll remove some of the more offensive provisions in reconciliation. The House Dems will have to trust that both the Senate and House leadership as well as the White House will work to produce a more moderate bill when in fact all three want a more liberal bill. They have to trust the party leadership even though neither Obama nor the Democrats have anything to gain and much to lose by going through the reconciliation process.
That's a lot of trust to place in politicians.
RLC