They did it. 220-215. The most historic piece of health care reform legislation to pass the House since Medicare in 1965 -- and let's not forget that Republicans (including Ronald Reagan) fought very hard against Medicare, calling it a "government takeover" and "socialized medicine." Sound familiar? Anyway, it passed with 219 Democratic votes and one Republican vote (!) -- Representative Ahn "Joseph" Cao (R-LA) -- even though House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) promised "unanimous Republican opposition" of the bill just a day earlier.
The bill is by no means perfect (and we can get into its shortcomings some other time), but it is a giant step in the right direction. By my health care reform count, we just passed step eight and we're on step nine of 12. If you oversimplify it, it would suggest that we're about 82% of the way there -- even though that last "18%" is going to be far more difficult than the previous 82%. Looking ahead: step nine would be senate passage, step 10 would be the conference (the merging of the house and senate bills), step 11 would be the passage in both chambers of congress of the new and (finally) final bill, and step 12 would be President Obama signing the legislation into law.
But despite how much it obviously excites me, I don't want to talk about future process. I want to talk about the Stupak amendment (PDF). Catholic pro-life Democrat Bart Stupak (D-MI) released an amendment to hit the house floor directly before the final vote on passage of the bill. The Stupak amendment basically states that "any part of the costs of any health care plan that includes coverage of abortion cannot be covered." This amendment passed 240-194. I wanted to add in a quick statement on why this amendment is ethically wrong, but once again, Ezra Klein has already beat me to it even before the amendment was passed:
Because of the limits placed on the [health insurance] exchanges, most of the participants will have some form of premium credit or affordable subsidy. That means most will be ineligible for abortion coverage. The idea that people are going to go out and purchase separate "abortion plans" is both cruel and laughable. If this amendment passes, it will mean that virtually all women with insurance through the exchange who find themselves in the unwanted and unexpected position of needing to terminate a pregnancy will not have coverage for the procedure. Abortion coverage will not be outlawed in this country. It will simply be tiered, reserved for those rich enough to afford insurance themselves or lucky enough to receive from their employers.Suffice it to say, it is a terrible amendment.
Even though I obviously care more about what the Stupak amendment entails more than the politics around it, I wanted to mainly focus on the politics. And literally as I was writing this, Greg Sargent at The Plum Line just made exactly what I wanted to do far easier by compiling the lists that I wanted to compile. (Thanks, Greg!)
So, here is the list of 35 Democrats that voted for the Stupak amendment and voted for the final bill. (There is also a list here of the additional 23 Democrats that voted for the amendment, but against the final bill.) Thus assuming that, if this amendment didn't pass, probably not all, but most of these 35 Democrats would likely have voted against the final bill's passage. To be extremely safe, let's say that 32 of them would have voted for it anyway -- even if the amendment had failed. If that were the case, then the bill still would have failed 217-218.
Going back to Joseph Cao (the lone Republican that voted for the House health care bill), he made it very clear that he would not vote for the House's bill if the Stupak amendment was not adopted. However, since the amendment passed, that's one more vote for Pelosi's health care reform package.
So where did all of these votes for Stupak's amendment come from? There are 258 Democrats in the house and 177 Republicans. If only 64 Democrats voted for it, how did the other 176 votes appear? ...Republicans! Near unanimous Republican support [with Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) voting "present."] for the Stupak amendment! Makes sense? Republicans are almost all pro-life. Understandable that they would vote for a pro-life amendment, right? From a conservative idealist standpoint? Yes. But from a Republican tactical standpoint? No.
I've been racking my brain over this and I came up with two reasons as to why the Republicans voted for the Stupak amendment.
- Obviously, they are pro-life. They could not take the heat if they were challenged on their record for voting down an amendment that stopped the federal funding of abortions. (However, this problem could have been somewhat reduced if they all voted "present" like Rep. Shadegg.)
- Or they assumed that the bill would pass the House anyway, so they all voted for Stupak's amendment, because at least they could strip abortion funding out of government subsidies at take that as a 1% win against their 99% loss.
This is insanely easy math: Let's strip out the two extremely obvious people that voted for the bill that would not have if the amendment didn't pass. Stupak and Cao. Gone. The bill still passes with a razor-thin majority: 218-217. Did the Republicans really calculate that all of the other 34 pro-life Democrats who ended up voting for passage of the final bill (with the amendment included) would have voted 'yea' on the House's bill with the language before the Stupak amendment? I don't think they would have. What about Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-OH) who said before the vote that he was "trying to get to yes," but said he won't vote for the health care bill unless it says "no federal funds used to pay for abortions and so that means no federal funds used to pay for abortion in the public option." And that's just one out of 34 threats to do so. If just Driehaus voted against the bill, even if the other 33 voted for it, the final package still would have lost 217-218.
What am I getting at? Obviously I wanted the bill to pass and I am extremely glad that it did so. I'm just confused by Republican tactics. If the Republicans (who knew the Stupak amendment vote was upcoming) congregated and said "we vote 'nay' on anything that moves this bill forward," Stupak's amendment would have went down 64-371 (or 64-194 with 177 Republicans voting "present") and then, in all likelihood, we would not have had a health care reform victory in the House last night.
Overall, the Stupak amendment is a horrible rollback on the rights of women and every person who voted 'yea' should be ashamed of themselves for putting women who qualify for the insurance exchange in the situation of purchasing separate "abortion plans" -- but in the insane world of politics, we should also probably thank Republicans for voting that way, because if they did not, we would not be celebrating the first major step towards a health care reform victory today.
Now, it's on to my oversimplified "step nine" where the Senate needs to vote through their bill. This will be the most difficult step so far, so all eyes are on the Senate. (And this will be especially difficult, because Lieberman's comments keep getting worse-and-worse.)
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UPDATE: (3:39PM) After meaningful and objective discussion with some of my closest advisers (Jon Geeting), we have come to the robust conclusion that "Republicans are stupid," which is the only reasoning that satisfies all possible scenarios. I feel that if they weren't so blinded by possibility of limiting abortion coverage, they would have done what I expected them to do (above) and simply kill the health care bill that they wanted to stop so badly.
There's also rumors going around congress that President Obama told Henry Waxman (D-CA) that he would "personally" work to remove the language from the Stupak amendment from the combined legislation in conference. I sincerely hope that he does. However, will the House pass the final bill without it?
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