Alex Koppelman
Salon
January 19, 2010
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| Most American are opposed to government mandated health care, but that does not concern Nancy Pelosi. | |
Given what looks like the impending loss of the party’s Senate supermajority, Democrats have reason to be down in the dumps about healthcare reform. But if that’s the way House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s feeling, she’s not showing it publicly.
“Let’s remove all doubt, we will have healthcare one way or another,” Pelosi said during an event in San Francisco on Monday. “Certainly the dynamic would change depending on what happens in Massachusetts. Just the question about how we would proceed. But it doesn’t mean we won’t have a health care bill.”
There is one way to pass the bill, even without 60 votes in the Senate, that’s getting a lot of attention now. But Pelosi probably won’t like it, and neither will a fair amount of her members.
The procedure in question would involve simply having the House vote on the bill that the Senate has already passed. That would mean avoiding yet another cloture vote in the Senate, one Democrats would be likely to lose if their caucus is down to 59 members after the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday.
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