Meet the 18 House Dems whose votes matter most on health care
By: David Freddoso
Online Opinion Editor
03/09/10 12:05 AM EST
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When health care reform passed the House in November, the vote was 220-215. Since that time, three Democrats who voted “yes” are no longer in the House (two resigned, one died). Also, the sole Republican voting “yes” has announced he will vote “no” when the Senate bill is brought to the House. One Democrat who voted “no” — Rep. Eric Massa, N.Y. — has announced he will resign.

Moreover, as many as a dozen Democrats who voted “yes” on the House version say they will vote “no” on the Senate version because it lacks language to prevent taxpayer subsidies for abortion coverage. Included in this group are Reps. Bart Stupak (Mich.), Jim Oberstar (Minn.), Marion Berry (Ark.) and Dan Lipinksi (Ill.).

If this math is correct, then Democrats have only about 205 votes to pass health care reform. With four empty House seats, they will need 216.

Democratic leaders will be working furiously to twist the arms of the 39 Democrats who voted “no” last time. Their names are listed below.

Note, however, that whip counts like this one are often unreliable. In 2003, as Republicans scrambled for the final votes for Medicare Part D, I interviewed one conservative Congressman who was adamantly opposed the bill. He laid out his case against it spectacularly. Hours later, he voted “yes” under heavy pressure from the Bush administration.

Here are the 18 Democrats who, after voting “no” on health care reform in November, are now most likely to flip and vote “yes” this time around:

John Adler, N.J. – On Fox News Sunday, he didn’t quite rule out voting “yes”: “If the House and the Senate can’t work out cost containment, I don’t see how I support a bill that doesn’t help our business community and create more jobs, he said.” (Fox News Sunday, Mar. 7, 2010)

Jason Altmire, Pa. – Altmire equivocated this weekend on Fox News Sunday, saying he has an “open mind” about it. “I have to make a decision between passing this bill…or doing nothing.  And I’m weighing the balance between the two.”

Brian Baird, Wash. – Although he said he planned to vote no, the retiring congressman hedged a bit on CNN’s State of the Union Mar. 7. “The problem is, if I think we could come up with a better solution, OK, than just to say health care reform goes down and therefore nothing ever happens, that would be a tragedy. And so that’s the choice. I don’t think this bill is what I would like to see us do if I could — if I ran the universe, as it were, but I don’t get to do that. So the status quo is unsustainable.”

John Barrow, Ga. – He always has close races in his Savannah-area district. A “yes” vote might end his career. He has not indicated how he will vote.

John Boccieri, Ohio – A Mar. 4 statement from his office says he is “encouraged” that President Obama’s plan “contains important provisions to reduce fraud, waste and abuse and reduce the deficit.”

Rick Boucher, Va. – He is considered by the AP one of those most likely to flip. But Boucher has resisted his party’s leadership in the past — for example, when he voted against McCain-Feingold.

Ben Chandler, Ky. – Chandler, already under fire for his support of cap-and-trade legislation last year, has given no public indication so far on his health care vote.  

Lincoln Davis, Tenn. – His office tells The Examiner that he remains undecided.

Bart Gordon, Tenn. – He is retiring, and considered by the Associated Press to be among those most likely to flip. In light of his recent comments, this seems quite likely.

Tim Holden, Pa. – The Allentown Morning Call reported last week that Holden, a pro-life Democrat, is not saying how he will vote.

Suzanne Kosmas, Fla. – Her office has not responded to The Examiner’s inquiries, but she is considered likely to flip.

Betsy Markey, Colo. – Her re-election chances are slim in a bad year for Democrats, but she isn’t ruling out a “yes” vote.

Jim Matheson, Utah – Just as he began to contemplate his vote, President Obama appointed his brother Scott to a federal judgeship. Matheson told The Deseret News that he is undecided.

Scott Murphy, N.Y. – The victor in a 2009 special election, Murphy is a fan of a single-payer health care system.

Glenn Nye, Va. – Among those considered most likely to switch and vote “yes.”

Ike Skelton, Mo. – Skelton, an old House bull with a pro-life voting record, could nonetheless be appealed to on party loyalty grounds, or even the loss of his chairmanship of the House Armed Services Committee.

John Tanner, Tenn. –Tanner is retiring. His staff recently released a statement that leaves him open to switching: “Until we know what that bill will include, how will it be brought to the floor and what the Congressional Budget Office says regarding its cost, there is no way for [Congressman] Tanner to declare his support or opposition.”

Harry Teague, N.M. – This freshman already polls behind his Republican challenger, who previously represented his district. He has given no clear indication as to how he will vote.

Among those likely to vote “no” again:

Dan Boren, Okla. – Boren, who has a very conservative record, will vote no, his spokesman told The Daily Caller.

Allen Boyd, Fla. – His office did not immediately respond to The Examiner’s inquiries.

Bobby Bright, Ala. – Bright, who narrowly won in a heavily Republican district in 2008, told The Daily Caller that he is voting “no.”

Travis Childers, Miss. – His office did not immediately respond to The Examiner’s inquiries.

Artur Davis, Ala. – Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill., accused Davis, an African-American, of being a race-traitor for voting “no.” But he is running for governor, and not only does he plan to vote “no” again, but he promised to leave the campaign trail if necessary and return to Washington to do so.

Chet Edwards, Tex. – He told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he will vote no.

Parker Griffith, Ala. – After the November vote, he switched parties and became a Republican. Good luck changing his mind.

Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin, S.D. – She told the Rapid City Journal she is a “no” vote.

Larry Kissell, N.C. – He told The Daily Caller that he is a “no” vote.

Frank Kratovil, Md. – A freshman in a tough rematch for re-election, Kratovil told the Annapolis Capital last week that he will vote “no,” if the House is asked to pass the Senate version of the health care bill.

Dennis Kucinich, Ohio – Kucinich voted against the House bill because he wants a single-payer system or nothing. He is considered likely to vote against it again. Then again, he was also pro-life until the moment he decided to run for president.

Jim Marshall, Ga. – He told the Daily Caller that ObamaCare will bankrupt the country. He’s a “no.”

Eric Massa, N.Y. – Here’s one Democrat who cannot be turned. He resigned from the House under a cloud of scandal, and over the weekend angrily accused Democratic leaders of railroading him because he voted “no” last time. He might have flipped if he’d stayed, but we’ll never know.

Mike McIntyre, N.C. – He participated in a December event in which members of Congress prayed for the failure of ObamaCare.

Mike McMahon, N.Y. – A Democrat representing Republican Staten Island, McMahon told the Staten Island Advance last week that he will vote “no.”

Charles Melancon, La. – He is locked in an uphill battle to unseat Republican Sen. David Vitter that will become completely hopeless if he changes his vote to “yes.”

Walt Minnick, Idaho – After the Associated Press published a report that he might change and vote “yes,” he called AP to say he will not be voting for this bill.

Peterson, Minn. – Peterson told Minnesota Public Radio that he will vote no.

Mike Ross, Ark. — Ross, who at first threatened to block the House bill in committee, relented, but he then voted against it under heavy pressure from constituents. He told The Daily Caller that he is a definite “no” vote.

Heath Shuler, N.C. – He told a local newspaper he will vote against any attempt to pass health care using reconciliation.

Gene Taylor, Miss. – One of the most conservative Democrats in the House, Taylor is among those least likely to bend. Although not definitive, his recent statements about the bill in his district strongly suggest a “no” vote.

Morning Bell: So, How’s That Pivot to Jobs Going?

Posted By Conn Carroll On March 5, 2010

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his “final” campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this “final” effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election ,  that President Obama’s first State of the Union would mark a “pivot”  from health care and to a “razor sharp focus on jobs” . So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report  this morning and it showed the U.S. economy shed another 36,000 net jobs last month. Our nation’s unemployment rate is still at 9.7%.

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available [5] show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six quarters of the ‘01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six quarters of this recession.

But if our economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama’s stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That’s a 7.3 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren’t businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:

At one of President Obama’s many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times  that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”
Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp,  told the Wall Street Journal : “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”
Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today  his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”
The New York Post ’s Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: “‘There hasn’t been one bankruptcy,’ he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they’re not — because ‘they don’t know what their costs are going to be.’”
National Federation of Independent Business  chief economist Bill Dunkelberg writes: “The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence.”
Our economy’s job creators have been trying to send a message to the Obama administration for months: stop creating so much uncertainty in the tax and regulatory environment so that we can figure out how to invest our money and start creating jobs. Stop taking over car companies . Stop shedding financing contracts . Stop taking over 1/6th of our economy . Stop raising taxes on our energy sector . Just stop.

Our economy will eventually recover and start producing jobs again, probably very soon. But that recovery has already been delayed by an administration that saw this recession as an opportunity to fundamentally rewrite our nation’s relationship with the federal government. Unless this administration completely abandons its far reaching transformation agenda, this recovery will be a very slow one.

Obama Goes Nuclear
By Philip Klein on 3.4.10

More than anything else, Barack Obama’s political rise was defined by the promise that he would usher in an era of post-partisanship after the bitter divisiveness that scarred Washington during the Bush years.

“The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states,” Obama famously lamented when he burst onto the national scene during his speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

On the night he was elected Senator that November, when Republicans retained control of all branches of government, Obama said that his “understanding of the Senate is that you need 60 votes to get something significant to happen, which means that Democrats and Republicans have to ask the question, do we have the will to move an American agenda forward, not a Democratic or Republican agenda forward?”

In 2006, he tried to disabuse his “fellow progressives” of the “notion that we should function sort of like Karl Rove where we identify our core base, we throw ’em red meat, we get a 50-plus-one victory.”

While running for president in 2007, he told the Concord Monitor that “We are not going to pass universal health care with a 50-plus one strategy.”

Instead, candidate Obama talked about building a “movement for change” in which citizens get organized and take an active role in agitating their lawmakers.

But any chance Obama had of living up to his well-honed image as a post-partisan leader was tossed aside on Wednesday, as the president urged Democrats in Congress to disregard public opinion and ram through his health care bill using a parliamentary maneuver that doesn’t require bipartisan support.

As it turns out, employing Rovian tactics in the pursuit of his liberal agenda is no vice.

In the past week, President Obama staged a series of what historian Daniel Boorstin dubbed “pseudo-events,” from a televised health care summit to the release of a letter offering token policy gestures to Republicans. The process culminated with the inevitable announcement that he would attempt to enact the most sweeping legislation since the Great Society with the once-poisonous “50-plus-one” strategy.

In his remarks, Obama pushed the argument that using the reconciliation process, which is intended for budgetary matters and not for sweeping legislation, is okay because they’d only be using the procedure to make changes, not to pass the whole bill. “Reform has already passed the House with a majority,” Obama said. “It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of 60 votes.” The problem is, those were two different bills. The House won’t be able to pass the Senate bill unless it’s changed, and thus passing the underlying overhaul of the nation’s health care system is still contingent upon the use of reconciliation.

Obama also tried to suggest that there was nothing out of the ordinary about this use of reconciliation, saying that health care legislation “deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the Children’s Health Insurance Program, that was used for COBRA health coverage for the unemployed, and, by the way, for both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”

Yet in virtually all of those cases, the programs passed with strong bipartisan support — welfare reform passed with 78 votes in the Senate, S-CHIP passed with 85 votes and COBRA passed by a simple voice vote. The first round of Bush tax cuts in 2001 garnered 58 votes — but 12 of those votes were from Democrats. Even the much more contentious second round of Bush tax cuts in 2003 received two Democratic votes before passing with 50 (plus Vice President Dick Cheney).

But comparisons to the tax legislation isn’t really fair, because the tax cuts expire at the end of this year, while Obama wants to use reconciliation to create a permanent new entitlement that would effectively put the government in charge of one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

Obama’s use of reconciliation is also much more likely to be explosive because the underlying bill it is being used to pass is overwhelmingly opposed by the public. That was not the case in prior instances of reconciliation.

As USA Today reported on August 3, 1996, Clinton was forced to sign welfare reform over fierce objections from liberals because it was so popular:

Clinton conceded that the bill has “flaws” but said he’d sign it.

With Election Day just three months away, he can read public opinion polls. They show that regardless of the (liberal) outcry, about eight of 10 Americans want welfare reform.

When CBS asked Americans in April 2001, “Do you favor or oppose George W. Bush’s $1.6 trillion tax cut for the country over the next 10 years?” supporters outnumbered opponents by a 51 percent to 37 percent margin. In June 2003, a Gallup poll found Americans supported the second round of cuts by a 47 percent to 43 percent plurality, while Harris found that 50 percent thought the tax cut was a “good thing” compared to 35 percent who said “bad thing.”

Yet polls show a majority of Americans oppose the health care bill and a CNN poll released last week found that just 25 percent of Americans want Congress to pass something similar to the two existing bills. A Gallup survey taken last week found that Americans oppose using the reconciliation procedure to pass a health care bill by a 52 percent to 39 percent margin. There has been a sustained national outcry against this legislation that first manifested itself in town hall meetings last August and culminated with the election of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts in January.

Yet Obama, whose entire candidacy was built around the idea that change must begin from the bottom up, is now pursuing a top down strategy.

“It is a complicated issue,” Obama said of health care on Wednesday, continuing, “it easily lends itself to demagoguery and political gamesmanship, and misrepresentation and misunderstanding.”  And he observed that “The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future.”

Evidently, according to Obama, Americans only oppose his favored proposals because they aren’t smart enough to understand them, and are incapable of looking out for their own interests and future.

In a plea to vulnerable Democrats and a tacit acknowledgement that his signature domestic initiative had become toxic to his own party, Obama said, “I do not know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.”

Within a matter of weeks, we’ll know whether the Obama and Congressional leaders will be able to convince enough Democrats to take suicide votes and advance national health care across the finish line. But win or lose, Obama is now destined to be a divider, not a uniter.