The Senate's new health care plan

Health care reform cleared its first hurdle in the Senate this weekend. In a party line vote of 60-39, the Senate voted Saturday evening to open debate on the bill put forward by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid. All 58 Democrats and both Independents voted in favor of the motion while 39 out of 40 Republicans voted against it. At a news conference immediately following the vote, Reid said ?The road ahead is a long stretch but we can see the finish line.? We speak to Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post about the vote and the House Finance Committee?s vote to audit the Federal Reserve.

AMY GOODMAN: Healthcare reform cleared its first hurdle in the Senate this weekend. In a party-line vote of 60-39, the Senate voted Saturday evening to open debate on the bill put forward by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. All 58 Democrats and both independents voted in favor of the motion while 39 out of 40 Republicans voted against it. At a news conference immediately following the vote, Harry Reid said ?The road ahead is a long stretch, but we can see the finish line.?

HARRY REID: Don?t try to silence the great debate over a great crisis. Don?t let history show that when given the chance to debate and defend your position, to work with us for the good of the country and constituents, you ran and hid. You cannot wish away a great emergency by closing your eyes and pretending it doesn?t exist. There is an emergency and it exists and it exists now.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more on the Senate version of the health care bill, I?m joined from Washington, D.C. by Ryan Grimm, the senior Congressional Correspondent for the Huffington Post. Ryan, welcome to ?Democracy Now!? Talk about the significance of this bill.

RYAN GRIMM: Amy, really, nobody should underestimate how significant this procedural vote on Saturday night was. People might want to portray it as simply a matter of moving to debate, but the fact that 60 Democrats, 60 members of the Democratic Caucus could unite behind the leader and push this forward against all 40 of the Republican Senators, shows that Democrats are least united in getting something done. It?s a sizable something, whether or not the public option even ends up in the final bill. This is one of the biggest social programs that has made it this far in the Senate in probably a generation. There are going to be tremendous amounts of subsidies that are going to go to low, working and middle Americans so that they can purchase private health insurance. If there?s no public health insurance option, that could also amount to a giant giveaway to private insurers, but at least the giveaway would come with them turning around

and giving people health insurance. The big question that?s going to face Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats over the next couple of weeks is the public health insurance option. You have folks like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu who are uncomfortable with the public option. But then you have people on the left, Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, even Roland Burris saying they?re not going to support something unless it meets what they want. Harry Reid has to try to find where he can cobble together the 60 votes, but what?s interesting is that they?re no longer debating whether to have a public option, but it?s now what form it will take.

It looks like something is shaping up around, Tom Carper, he?s a Democrat from Delaware, kind of a centrist conservative guy. He was the guy that sort of the originally proposed this public option that would allow individual states to opt-out of it. I think he might even a little bit surprised actually that it did so well and that it?s become a central part of this debate. Now he?s coming in with a new plan that instead of an opt-out there would be an opt-in, but if states didn?t and insurance is unaffordable in those states,

then they?re automatically enrolled. So if somebody like Alabama says ?We don?t want be part of this,? but insurance is unaffordable in the state, then they?re automatically enrolled in it. I talked to Olympia Snowe on Saturday night and she said that Carper has asked him for elements of her trigger language. So it looks like Snow and Carper might try and meld something that could maybe get the support of people like Landrieu and Nelson who aren?t ideologues about the thing like Joe Lieberman is, and that could get you to 60.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what happened with the, well Stupak Amendment in the House, this whole battle over women?s rights to choose being included and covered by health insurance. What?s happening in the Senate Ryan Grimm?

RYAN GRIMM: This was something you could kind of see coming in the House. You had this block of apparently 64 Democrats who are willing to vote for extreme, extreme restrictions on reproductive freedom. They were able to accomplish the biggest rollback of reproductive rights in probably a generation. They passed this Stupak Amendment which would in many cases would prevent women from spending their own money on private plans that cover abortion. The Senate pushed back on this. Paradoxically, the Senate is actually more progressive on the issue of choice.

There are a lot of different reasons for that, partly because you have senators who represent entire States rather than just tiny center-right or right-wing districts. They just simply do not have 60 votes to push through the extreme rollback of reproductive rights. What they did is they put into the Senate bill language that says no federal money will go to abortion and that is intended to satisfy folks who say they don?t want their tax dollars to fund abortion procedures. So the folks who then say well, money is fungible and if I give a dollar here, you might spend a somewhere else. They said, well, OK, the Health and Human Services secretary can audit these insurance plans to make sure that this dollar here is not going to fund this project over here.

Now, of course the irony is that churches are the ones making this argument that money is fungible. At the same time, churches get all kinds of tax breaks and government money. And then at the same time, they do government lobbying and they say, well, we?re not doing government lobbying with these tax breaks and we have separate entities. Clearly, they?re of the opinion that you can separate funds. That?s all the Senate does. It is going to set up a fight on the House side, so, Pelosi?s going to have her work cut out for her to get it through. Now, it?s unlikely, though, that these 64 Democratic House members are all going to hold together to block health care reform. A number of them have said that it comes down to killing the bill, that they?re not willing to take that step. These are still, believe it or not, Democrats.

And if the Senate has passed this landmark historic health care reform legislation, sent it over to the House and the only thing standing between President Obama and this health care reform bill are these Democrats, enough of them, I think, are probably going to come on board for it and just swallow it and vote for compromise.

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grimm, the position of Boris Sanders, the independent of Vermont, the democratic socialist of Vermont?

RYAN GRIMM: He?s been inching closer and closer to drawing a line in the sand over the last several months. He makes a very clear and, frankly, convincing case. He says, look, this is a democratical written bill. More than 80% of Democrats want a public option. More than 50 senators want a public option. How are we going to let two, three, or four conservative Democrats dictate to the rest of the party whether or not there?s going to be a public option in the bill? He has yet to make the final decision to filibuster a bill that does not include a public option. If only one Democratic senator or member of the Democratic caucus, which he is, decides to filibuster it, then they don?t have the votes unless they move to the right and can pick up a Snowe or Collins or somebody like that.

On Sunday he said that he would not vote for final passage of a health care bill if it didn?t include a public health insurance option. It?s slightly different than saying he would filibuster it. In other words, he would vote to end the filibuster but then when it comes up for final passage, he won?t be there. But they only need 50 votes plus Joe Biden on final passage. It?s a step closer. In his statement, he said that he strongly suspects that there are other members of the Democratic caucus that feel like ? the same way that he does. I said Sherrod Brown and Roland Burris are among them. So if you end up having a block of four, five, six Democrats who withhold their support or one or two who say that they will filibuster a bill that doesn?t have a public option, then Reid simply has to deal with them or the bill can?t get through. That raises the pressure on people like Landrieu and Lieberman who want to kill it from the opposite side.

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grimm, I wanted to move to the amendment to audit the Federal Reserve that passed the House Finance committee last week. The amendment was co-sponsored by Representatives Ron Paul and Alan Grayson. This is Florida Democrat Grayson speaking before the vote.

ALAN GRAYSON: What kind of country are we going have? Over the past few weeks and months of the past two years we?ve seen the Federal Reserve hand out half trillion worth of money to foreign central banks. Our money, money that cheapens the value of every dollar that?s in our pocket, every dollar that?s in our bank account, every dollar that?s in our 401k. We?ve seen the Federal Reserve, among other things, remove $230 billion from Citibank?s liabilities for mortgage-backed securities, and accept that liability itself while leaving Citibank the entire upside in exchange for nothing. My own fear is this can no longer go on. If we go on with a system where an organization is not responsive, it?s secretive, is more secretive, in fact, than the CIA, if we go on with a situation like that where this organization is simply handing out our money, the U.S. dollar, to private entities and to private interests, then the whole system will collapse.

AMY GOODMAN: Florida Democrat Alan Grayson speaking in the House. Your response, Ryan Grimm. Explain exactly what?s going on here.

RYAN GRIMM: Well, lobbyists, staffers and other people watching this amendment process unfold were absolutely stunned that Ron Paul and Alan Grayson were able to beat the Fed on this and the back story is pretty telling. It is also kind of a road map forward for a new kind of populist progressive coalition politics that is now possible in the U.S. congress. Going into the vote which was supposed to be on Wednesday, it was clear that uncontested, the Paul Grayson had enough votes because it was developed from a bill that has more than 300 co-sponsors, and there are enough of those people on the committee that they could have passed it through. So the response from opponents of the bill was to introduce a new amendment, which they called a Serious?with a capital S?Amendment. It was introduced by Mel Watt who represents Charlotte, where Bank of America happens to be, and it said we agree with you, we want transparency at the Federal Reserve, but these wacko Ron Paul Alan-Grayson types, they just want to destroy the Fed.

And almost always in Washington when you have this serious, reasonable kind of compromise, come up the pike, then the moderates and some of the liberals who are supporting the other bill will say, OK, you know what? Let?s move back to the center and let?s take this reasonable approach forward. But what happened on Tuesday, Huffington Post reported that this Mel Watt amendment is not in fact just a compromised version of what Paul and Grayson are doing, but it actually adds restrictions to the ability to audit the Federal Reserve. It added four major restrictions of what could not be audited which currently can and it?s said that any audit that takes place must be done in accordance with current law. Current law bars, essentially, audits of the Federal Reserve. So, the amendment was a total sham. Then the Watt Amendment backers sent around a letter by what they called eight prominent economists backing his amendment rather than the Paul-Grayson type. Interestingly, this letter was written in the beginning of November, about a week before Watt unveiled his own amendment. You can kind of guess where this came from.

So what I did was I just Googled the eight economists who were on this letter, seven of them had close ties to the Federal Reserve, four of them are currently on the Federal Reserve payroll. So that kind of showed a little bit of operation in bad faith. So what you had on Thursday when the vote was held, was a real debate. You knew that the Federal Reserve was backing the Mel Watt amendment, and that the Mel Watt amendment did not open the Fed to transparency and the Paul Grayson one did. It?s rare in Congress, unfortunately, that votes are held with clear distinctions. There?s usually so much fog around this or that, vote for this it?s kind of what you want, but not all the way. This would say, no, in fact, this is not even close to what you want, it goes the opposite direction. It was not just a squeaker, it was a crushing victory. The fear among the Paul-Grayson backers was that they?d pass their amendment and then the Watt one would come up and that would also pass, and the Watt one would trump Paul Grayson and the entire effort to audit the Fed would be obliterated.

What the Paul-Grayson people were able to do was amend the Watt amendment by just wiping it out and replacing it with Paul-Grayson. Once they were able to accomplish that, 15 Democrats joined pretty much every Republican and they were able to pass it overwhelmingly. It was a stunning victory. Especially after Chairman Barney Frank, who had previously said he was going to support Ron Paul, backed off and recommended a vote against Paul and for this centrist ?Compromise.? Now, what?s interesting also is that the Republican support of this has to be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt because it only comes after they lost power. It?s likely that they?re doing some of this just to cause trouble for the majority and for Obama. As long as there are supporter is here, there are ways to capitalize on it.

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Grimm, I want to thank you very much for being with us, of the Huffington Post, speaking to us from Washington, D.C. When we come back from the break, we are going to Toronto. We?ll be speaking with award-winning journalist Naomi Klein. Stay with us.




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