WASHINGTON — On the eve of President Barack Obama’s planned health care summit, Democratic lawmakers are increasingly confident they can resurrect sweeping overhaul legislation after weeks of uncertainty about whether they could overcome unified Republican opposition.
Democratic leaders, who have struggled to find a way to unify their own ranks, have settled on a strategy to avoid a Republican filibuster by persuading wary House Democrats to pass unchanged the health care bill approved by the Senate last year and send it directly to Obama for his signature.
At the same time, Democrats in the Senate are rallying behind the use of a bare-knuckle legislative procedure known as budget reconciliation to push through a separate package of health care measures to satisfy liberal Democrats in the House.
That package, which would require a simple majority and would not be subject to a GOP filibuster, combined with the overhaul bill, would result in a bundle of legislation close to the blueprint outlined by the president Monday.
“I’m more interested in the package than the process,” Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., a former critic of using reconciliation, said Tuesday at the Capitol.
Senate leaders now believe they have the 51 votes needed to pass the reconciliation package.
On the other side of the Democratic ideological spectrum, Rep. Lynn Woolsey, D-Calif., a co-chairwoman of the House Progressive Caucus who has bitterly criticized the Senate bill, expressed optimism that Democrats were nearing a breakthrough. “I think we are on our way,” she said.
Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., another liberal who criticized the Senate bill and the president’s leadership after Republican Scott Brown’s victory last month in the Massachusetts Senate race cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, credited Obama with turning the tide by posting his own health care blueprint on the Internet.
“With his action yesterday, he shook us out of our post-Brown stupor, and we’re back to legislating,” he said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., still must find 218 votes to advance the Senate health care legislation, a task that has only grown harder with the recent death of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., and the departure of Robert Wexler, D-Fla., who resigned in January to take another job. Democrat Neil Abercrombie also is leaving at the end of the month to run for governor of Hawaii.
Some House Democrats also continue to express concerns about details of the emerging legislative strategy. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., a conservative who has pushed for tough restrictions on federal funding for abortion, said Tuesday that Obama’s proposal does not include sufficient safeguards.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, are keeping up their criticism.
“We just don’t care for this bill, and neither do the American people,” said Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican. “And it’s time for us, it’s time really for this president and the majority in this Congress to start listening to the American people.”
Obama has said he would review Republican suggestions to amend health care legislation at his summit Thursday. But few believe that a bipartisan compromise is likely.
And there are increasing signs that the continued GOP opposition actually may be helping to unite Democrats.
Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., a centrist, said the looming rate hikes by Anthem Blue Cross, which is raising premiums for some customers in California by as much as 39 percent, also had served as a “wake-up call.”
For House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a leading architect of the campaign to revamp health care, the change in momentum has been palpable. “We’ve turned the corner,” he said. “The president has weighed in. The issues are no longer open. We are at the end of the road.”
The plan being finalized by Democratic leaders to break the health care logjam would set up a complicated sequence of votes in the House and Senate over the next five weeks.
Under parliamentary rules, House Democrats would first be required to pass the Senate health care bill, a step that many lawmakers have resisted for nearly two months because they object to provisions such as a new tax on high-end “Cadillac” health plans, which could ultimately affect many middle-income households.
To convince House Democrats that the objectionable provisions will be altered or removed, senior lawmakers plan to draw up a second bill that includes changes they can show to House Democrats.
This would be accompanied by a letter signed by at least 51 senators pledging to vote for the second bill after the House votes on the Senate legislation.
Once the House acts on the Senate bill and sends it to the White House for Obama’s signature, both chambers could vote on the second bill.
Democratic leaders hope that could be done by the time Congress breaks for Easter recess at the end of March.
