Posted by Dan Perrin
RedState.com
2/25/2010
Senator Conrad, the Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee said yesterday that reconciliation can only be used if the House passes the Senate bill first. As Sen. Conrad declared, “I don’t know of any way, I don’t know of any way where you can have a reconciliation bill pass before the bill that it is meant to reconcile passes.” Neither do I.
Then, the kicker: “When reminded that House Democrats don’t want to do health care in that order, Conrad said bluntly: ‘Fine, then it’s dead.‘”
Now, the Speaker finds herself in the position of having to pass a bill she says she does not have the votes to pass.
Without passing the Senate bill she can’t pass, the Speaker can’t do reconciliation. (See Sen. Conrad, above.)
OK. Now, this next part is really, really important.
The Speaker and the White House find themselves in this position because of Senator DeMint (R-SC). He insisted that Senator McConnell object to the appointment of the House-Senate Conferees, thus preventing a Conference on the bill.
The inability of the Dems to have a House-Senate Conference then forced the Speaker to have a House floor vote on the Senate bill, which she can’t pass. And there the process has been stuck. Has not moved an inch since Sen. DeMint’s objection. It can’t, she does not have the votes…
…When the Democrats finally admit ObamaCare is dead, historians should note, this is the single act that killed it. And it was such an artistic assassination of the bill…
The article continues at RedState.com
On their Facebook page Small Business Against Big Government (SBABG) commented:
Just want to point out, too, that at the time Demint did this, it was a “foregone conclusion” that the Mass seat that Scott Brown one would still be Democrat and Dems would still have their 60 vote majority in the senate, so they weren’t worried about the Conference. But because Demint did this, once Brown won the election, it closed the lid on the trap Demint had set. Totally brilliant.
