After pushing for an up-or-down vote on health care, the White House has lost control of the reform debate and won’t be pinned down on the House plan to pass it without a vote.
“I’m not changing the standard we’re holding ourselves to,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. “When Republicans use these types of rules four out of 10 times in a previous Congress and then vociferously object to the use of that rule now … to embrace something and then find it objectionable [is] a pivot that requires something few figure skaters in the Olympics are able to pull off.”
House Democratic leaders have intensified the debate over reform by considering a move to generally approve the Senate’s health care reform bill without forcing members to vote on it.
While constitutional scholars debate the legality of the move, the White House has tried to step away from the process and shift focus back to the policy — with no success.
Journalists at the White House hammered Gibbs over whether President Obama’s tacit embrace of the legislative maneuver was a violation of the higher standard he campaigned on.
But the administration also has done its part to politicize the process, pushing an earlier plan to pass health care reform with simple majorities in the House and Senate — a move that would deny Republicans the right to filibuster.
Outraged reaction to that earlier plan from Republicans was nothing compared with the anger generated by the latest proposal, which calls for House members to vote on fixes to the Senate health care bill without casting a vote on the bill itself.
“The American people will say that’s the last straw,” Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona told Fox News.
Passing health care without a vote would give moderate Democrats and other members political cover to say they never actually voted for a plan that polls show about half the country opposes.
The trouble for the White House is that as recently as Monday, Obama was still calling for “an up-or-down vote” on reform. Gibbs insists there will be one, or that it won’t matter because lawmakers’ positions on reform are already well-known.
The White House is trying, alternately, to argue that the point of health care reform is to help struggling Americans, and debate of the process is beside the point.
Obama is hoping that if he can secure reform in any case, voters will forget the way it was passed and credit him with fulfilling a central campaign promise.
But just in case, Gibbs said that Obama, while still making calls to lawmakers on reform, is also busy with other things.
“I mean, look, the president, again, has a [presidential daily briefing] every day; we had a senior advisers meeting, and he’s got stuff later today that doesn’t deal with health care,” Gibbs said.
