Lautenberg Signs Public Option Letter

Besides being boringly morbid, you miss some very important points, beginning with the fact these senators are committing to using reconciliation to enact the PO. They already have 16 and they only need 34 more. Please stop whining; it's bad for your health and probably a pre-exisiting condition.

Actually, that's not right. Unless someone who was for it previously (at least with lip-service) flips. There SHOULD be enough votes to pass it.

The real news would be if someone who USED TO SUPPORT IT flips. Most lists of the "Nine Who Would Vote Against" rely on DiFi and Baucus. She kind of blew that out of the water. If Baucus were to come out for it (and remember he *said* he personally favored it), it would be pretty damn difficult to say they don't have the votes.

Honestly. If democrats can't even get 51, you guys should just give up trying to do government - because you clearly aren't qualified. What's the excuse today?

Note, it's not enough to just have 50 votes. You very specifically need to have Kent Conrad on board, because he is head of the budget committee and any reconciliation bill has to go through him. Kent Conrad has endorsed reconciliation for a "sidecar" to amend the Senate bill. He's not said anything specific about what he'd do if we tried to pass a public option through reconciliation, or put the public option into the sidecar.

(Of course, I really seriously doubt the leadership is going to put the public option into the sidecar, because they've been consistently and increasingly risk-averse on the health care bill and putting the public option into the sidecar creates at least some risk that the sidecar won't get to 50. So also in order for this letter to have effect, you also probably need to get the health care sidecar passed first, or get the health care bill passed through some method that doesn't involve a sidecar.)

This said, I think people signing at least moves us in the right direction on the public option, especially now that we're up in the double digits, because it puts pressure on people like Conrad and signals to the leadership that there will be some interest in the Senate for a reconciliation strategy on the public option. Let's say, totally hypothetically, that we get up to 48 people signing on this letter. From the leadership's perspective things then probably look like "huh, we only have to get two more people on board to pass a public option using reconciliation".