Health Care: Reid Promises Bill With or Without Republicans, Harkin Talks to AlterNet, Schumer Lays an Egg

Standing before an audience of union members, former Obama campaign volunteers and media in a cramped room in the Capitol Visitors Center, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid spoke in historical terms of the health-care bill he melded out of the bills crafted by two Senate committees. Reading from a letter to Congress written by President Harry Truman 64 years ago to the day, Reid called upon the Senate to get behind his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

"He knew that the health of the American people is linked to the health of the American economy," Reid said of Truman. He then noted that a person who was one year old at the time Truman penned the letter would, this very day, become eligible for Medicare. (C-SPAN has video here.)

Reid stood surrounded by Democratic senators from the Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., his assistant majority leader. In their triumphant mood, each of the Democrats seemed to assume their individual personae quite fully.

Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., invoked the spirit of the late Ted Kennedy, whose reins of the HELP Committee Dodd took while crafting the bill during the last days of Kennedy's illness. The affably pugilistic Durbin played true to form, noting that the largest criticism he heard from the Republican side was that the bill was 2,000 pages long.

"I might remind the Republican side of the aisle that when it comes to the size of legislation, it was that bank-bailout bill that the last president proposed that was only three pages long," Durbin said. "Now, there's a work of wisdom."

Durbin also projected a raft of legal challenges from insurance companies after the bill is passed. "[Y]ou better make sure you have a lot of pages there to cover the law suits they're going to file to try to stop us," he said.

Chuck Schumer of New York, standing in for Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (who was in his home state of Montana tending to his sick mother), exceeded expectations of persona-fulfillment with a very bad joke about breakfast foods. Referring to "that impresario, that great chef, Harry Reid," Schumer said, "I have this tie on here: it has eggs and cheese and pork. So, it's a great omelet. Harry made a great omelet. You sometimes have to break a few eggs to make a great omelet, but he did...We have great cheese from the Finance Committee and great pork from the HELP Committee. I couldn't say we had great pork from the Finance Committee or I'd be in trouble."

At one point during Schumer's McMuffin speech, Dodd leaned over to whisper in Harry Reid's ear. Would that we could know what he said.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who won her first term in the U.S. Senate running as "a mom in tennis shoes," spoke today "as a senator and a mom," telling the story of a constituent who lost her job, only to see her insurance premiums rise by 60 percent.

The folksy Iowa senator, HELP Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, exuded his farmboy charm while referring to Reid's opening remarks. ""I'm sure glad you had that letter from Harry Truman written on November 19, 1945," Harkin said. "That was an important day. It was my sixth birthday. I remember it well. I said, 'I'm gonna be [in the Senate] and I'm gonna carry Harry Truman's dream forward.'"

Reid brought to the podium Loretta Johnson, a health-care worker who has no health insurance, who said she stood as a representative of SEIU "and its 2.1 million workers."

"Now, in my opinion, there's probably some room for improvement in this bill," Johnson said, promising to stay on Capitol Hill to make sure the senators "do the right thing."  The Senate bill includes an excise tax on comprehensive health plans that is opposed by labor unions.

Answering reporters' questions, Reid was characteristically taciturn. Asked how he would find the 60 votes he needs to stop a promised Republican filibuster from preventing the bill from reaching the Senate floor, Reid seemed to say that despite the threat posed by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., who said he would filibuster a bill that contains a public option (as Reid's bill does),things are not quite as they appear.  Things change when it comes time for a vote, he implied, saying, "I think the first place you should look is at what happened in the House. There were people who voted for that legislation on each side -- for example, the abortion issue. People couldn't understand how they voted that way."

Yeah, but that wasn't exactly a happy outcome.

Reid then dangled a tantalizing possibility. "I've had conversations during the past few days, the past few weeks, with Sen. Snowe," he said. "I've spoken with Sen. Collins." Olympia Snowe is the Maine Republican whose vote Senate Finance Committee Chairman Baucus spent months trying to secure on his committee's bill. Susan Collins is Snowe's Republican colleague from the same state; she has not generally been seen as willing to vote against her party. So Reid was essentially threatening Joe Lieberman, who caucuses with the Democrats, with rendering him irrelevant via the potential votes of Republicans.

"But everyone should understand, we're going to do a bill," Reid said. "I hope that we don't have to do it with just Democrats, but if we have to, we will."

And about that abortion language. The House bill passed with the anti-choice Stupak amendment that would prohibit women purchasing health insurance that includes abortion coverage through the federally-administered insurance exchange, even using their own dollars. The abortion language in the Senate bill is far less draconian, only prohibiting the use of federal dollars for abortion coverage, and creating a "fire wall" between public and private dollars in the purchase of such coverage.

At least one anti-choice Democrat, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, has promised to prevent a bill that does not contain an abortion procription along the lines of the Stupak language from coming to the Senate floor.

Answering a reporter's question, Reid said, "First of all, this is a health-care bill; it's not an abortion bill. And the language we have in the bill... I think it's something that's in keeping with what the tradition has been in our country for more than 30 years." The tradition to which Reid referred is known as the Hyde amendment, which bars federal dollars from being used for abortions for women on Medicaid, the public health-care program for the poor.

Reid was also asked if, should he find himself unable to secure the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, he would resort to a filibuster-proof process known as reconciliation, which is reserved for matters of finance and budget. "I won't use reconciliation," he replied. End of conversation.

After the event, I spoke with Harkin, asking whether he thought the bill's current abortion language would survive the legislative process, or whether it would be burdened with an anti-choice amendment such as that promised by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who yesterday promised a "holy war" over the health-care bill.

"I would say the broad mainstream of America seems to feel good about where we are in terms of no federal funding, but you have people on the fringes," Harkin said. "You have people who actually want to do away with Roe v. Wade and are bent on make all abortions totally illegal, and you have the other fringe that wants to wipe away any restrictions. But that's not where the bulk of the American people are. They're kind of where we are right now, and in the end, that's where we're going to be."

But, I asked, will the war over heath care be holy, as Hatch promised, or unholy?

"Well, I wouldn't put it in religious terms, or anything like that," Harkin said. "Sometimes people say things like that. Orrin's a great friend of mine; we've worked together on a lot of things in the past, and I think there's a lot of hyperbole going on out there. But now we're down, as I say, to the substance, and when we start getting down into the substance -- and I think that's what a lot of Republicans have feared: We're getting to this point where we actually start talking about the substance of the bill, rather than 'death panels' and all that kind of nonsense."

Jane Norman of CQ then pressed Harkin on the reality of getting those elusive 60 votes. "I've been saying for a long time, when all is said and done and when that vote is called no one who calls themselves a Democrat or a member of our caucus is gonna want to be the person who stops this bill -- I mean on procedural votes," Harkin said. "Now, they may vote for a certain amendment or against a certain amendment, or they may even vote against the bill on an up-or-down vote, but on procedure, I think our team is together."