The House has voted 219-212 to approve the Health Care Bill, legislation set to extend coverage to 32 million Americans and Obama’s top domestic priority.
When the final vote needed to pass the bill was tallied, some Democrats chanted “Yes we can. Yes we can.”
This post first appeared on the Daily Kos.
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum says that while he opposes the health care reform plan, its passage will represent a major defeat for the Republican Party. In his words, it will be the GOP’s “Waterloo.” Watch here.
Bart Stupak, the anti-choice Democrat who’s threatened to derail reform over abortion, has just announced that he’ll vote yes on the health care bill.
Stupak said the President has promised to sign an executive order reiterating the ban on federal funding for abortions (provisions already contained in the bill). (The White House has released the executive order. Read it here.)
“The real winner is the American people,” said Stupak, going through the reforms contained in the bill such as the ban on preexisting conditions and the expansion of coverage to 32 million. Several other holdouts like Marcy Kaptur also made comments justifying their previous opposition to the bill and stating their support.
The Hill reported that 8 or 9 Democrats previously opposed to the deal will be voting yes.
Stupak said this puts Democrats well over the 216 votes needed to pass the bill.
Like “Climate Change” – the two words are very ordinary, but then also impossibly scary. Without emotion or “color” – they are simple and simply unbelievable. Mountaintop removal is so uncomfortable that it is sometimes shortened to MTR, like a company or the initials of a President. That is a mistake. We should always lumber through the entire phrase, mountaintop removal.
In fact, “Mountaintop Removal” – let’s put it in caps from now on. It is our banner. The phrase was first mouthed, listened to and insistently repeated by the ordinary people who witnessed the abomination. They stared and they covered their children’s eyes and they said these words.
Mountaintop Removal is created from the simple fact of the matter. It is the observation by the people who live in the valleys below the explosions, gigantic bulldozers, conveyor belts zig-zagging down the valleys, lakes of slurry laced with carcinogenic chemicals… The victims wrote the words and it stuck. Most language doesn’t come this way anymore. It doesn’t come unedited this way, straight from people. Corporate marketing creates most of our words for us, so that we’ll use their words to buy things.
Mountaintop Removal is ungreenwashable. All the cancerous deaths, poisoned streams, CO-2 emissions from the dirty coal, shit-colored tap-water – all that devastation is felt within the irreducible two words. The word is an honest, obscene monument. It is how the summits of rock live on in our memory. The heights that the coal companies thought would vanish and not be missed – the high places are refusing to fall into the railroad cars. They rise in the blue sky because they are surrounded by people from the mountains who love the mountains and believe in them as the horizon of life, like the memory of the shape and feel of the face of a dead mother.
We have the weapon of this imposing phrase, Mountaintop Removal. Sometimes it feels like all we have is the amazing accusation of those two words. The corporations know that the two words cannot be allowed to survive. They put billboards all over Appalachia cutting the stubborn phrase Mountaintop Removal with patriotism, with energy independence, with prosperity and education for Appalachia’s under-served youth. In other words – they are trying everything. None of it works. The mountains are still there in our minds, with these two words standing in for the 470 missing Appalachian peaks. Mountaintop Removal.
As for our little activist church – we respond to the two words like thousands of others. We hear the words of the people in those mountains and that is enough to get to work. Mountaintop Removal can change a life in a one-room flat in New York City, with a brick air-shaft in the window. Mountaintop Removal is unbelievable and we respond to the idea of it with belief. We rise and rise and rise on the slopes of where the mountain is returning.
This post was originally published on Think Progress.
This morning on C-Span’s Washington Journal, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) justified the disturbing racist and homophobic epitaphs that angry tea baggers hurled yesterday at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), and other House Democrats. Nunes insisted that everyone has a right to “smear” whoever they want and that the tea baggers’ behavior was understandable given the “crazy totalitarian tactics” that he alleges Democrats are engaged in:
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This post was first written by RH Reality Check, by Jodi Jacobson.
To close the deal on a health care bill that, if passed tonight, will impose the greatest restrictions on women’s rights to choose whether or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term since before Roe v Wade, the White House is now negotiating a deal with Michigan Congressman Bart Stupak, an anti-choice Democrat, to sign an executive order on the Hyde Amendment.
The Hill reports that Stupak said Sunday morning he is “close to striking a deal with the Obama administration on abortion provisions.”
“We are close to getting something done,” Stupak said in an interview with MSNBC.
UPDATE: Stupak is still a “no” vote on the bill.
Earlier today MSNBC reported that Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), who’s threatened to derail reform over concerns that the health care bill doesn’t place adequate restrictions on federal funding for abortions, would be voting yes on the bill. CNN, however, has said that Stupak told a reporter that he’s still waiting on a deal with the White House.
Stupak has demanded that the President sign an executive order reiterating that no federal funds be used for abortion. (RH Reality check has more detail on all the abortion restrictions already in place in the health care bill, and on the implications of the executive order Stupak is pushing for.)
Earlier today, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), part of a block of anti-choice Dems led by Stupak who opposed the health care bill, said her concerns about abortion coverage were met and that’d she’d vote in support of reform.
Democrats need 216 votes.
This post was originally published on the Washington Monthly.
A TIMELINE OF EVENTS…. Several readers have asked what the schedule looks like for today, in terms of what votes are likely to happen when. It’s been tough to put together a timeline, and scrapping “deem and pass” means the process will take a bit longer.
CBS News, however, put this timeline together, which is consistent with what I’m hearing from Hill aides:
2 p.m.: The House will debate for one hour the rules of debate for the reconciliation bill and the Senate bill.
3 p.m.: The House will vote to end debate and vote on the rules of the debate.
3:15 p.m.: The House will debate the reconciliation package for two hours.
5:15 p.m.: The House will vote on the reconciliation package.
5:30 p.m.: The House will debate for 15 minutes on a Republican substitute and then vote on the substitute.
6 p.m.: The House will vote on the final reconciliation package.
6:15 p.m.: If the reconciliation bill passes, the House will immediately vote on the Senate bill, without debate.
Also note, if the House approves the Senate bill, it will go directly to the White House. It’s possible, if not likely, that President Obama would sign it into law this evening.
But if the vote counting goes poorly for the Democratic leadership today, it’s also possible that Speaker Pelosi could delay a vote until tomorrow (or later), if she decides the votes aren’t there and she needs more time to get them.
For now, however, the timeline published by CBS looks about right. It’s subject to revision, of course, but it’s something to keep in mind as you plan your day.
Never mind the prospect of health-care reform, such as it will be should the bill pass tomorrow. I’ll just be grateful for a break from all the protesters roaming my neighborhood. Because some are kinda scary, and more than a few are downright nasty.
This afternoon, as they exited President Obama’s speech to Democratic House members at the Capitol Visitor Center and made their way to a House office building, several lawmakers were subjected to epithets hurled by protesters, and in one incident, a protester was arrested after reportedly spitting on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, an African-America who represents Missouri’s 5th District, according to Sam Stein of the Huffington Post.
