Nancy Pelosi held a conference call today on health care and spent about 30 minutes discussing what's happening now and taking Q's. (I think it's important to get these conference calls up to our readers.)
The HOUSE does not trust the Senate and will not move forward unless Harry Reid gets the Senate rolling first. She's not alone. The Senate has lost the trust of the American people completely. She reaffirmed that the Senate bill has no chance of passing the HOUSE as is.
Pelosi has insisted for some time now that the Senate health care bill can not pass the House unamended, but that she can probably round up the votes if the Senate and the House both pass a sidecar bill making a number of pre-emptive changes to it.
"Don't even ask us to consider passing the Senate bill until the other legislation has passed both houses so that we're sure that it has happened, and that we know that what we would be voting for would be as effected by a reconciliation bill or whatever parliamentary initiative they have at their disposable," Pelosi said on a conference call this afternoon.
Senate aides have complained that her plan presents them with a big parliamentary difficulty: they don't know if they can pass legislation amending a bill that hasn't been signed into law yet.
Pelosi says that's simply not true.
"No. It is not an obstacle to this path forward."
She talks about repealing the anti-trust exemption, fixing the excise tax and the public option, "reconciliation' as well as some other issues about HCR. I didn't have time to write up a detailed review on today's call so please listen to the above audio.
She was surprisingly confident today about getting something done and says we're close. We'll see. She didn't want to talk for the Senate at all either.
And the operator was awful handling the call because a lot of us had questions and she didn't translate that to the Speaker so it appeared that there were hardly any questions coming in for the Speaker, That led to question hogs.(LOL) I was going to either ask about the public option or the Stupak amendment.
