11/18: Is Bart Full Of Bluster?

Bloggers on both the left and right are discussing Rep. Bart Stupak's (D-MI) appearance on Fox and Friends, in which he warned that "healthcare will not move forward" if his abortion amendment is removed from the bill. Several liberal bloggers are arguing that Stupak can't back up his threat. First, they believe that only 10 House Dems would actually switch their vote from "yay" to "nay" if Stupak's amendment were removed, and they think that "a 10-vote bloc represents a serious problem...but not an insurmountable hurdle." Second, they're arguing that there aren't enough votes in the Senate to add a version of Stupak's amendment to the bill. Conservative bloggers, meanwhile, are excited about Stupak's campaign, since it has "created a fault line for Democrats that they didn't need in 2009."

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Liberal bloggers (Cole, Lemos, Sudbay) are pleased that the Senate broke a GOP filibuster of Judge David Hamilton, Pres. Obama's nominee for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Lefty bloggers (Benen, Klein) are accusing GOP senators of hypocrisy, since many of them criticized the filibuster during the Bush admin.
• Liberal bloggers (McCarter, Walker, Sudbay) are buzzing about a new ABC News/Washington Post poll which found that a majority of Americans support a public option. Some lefty bloggers (McCarter, Llorens) are urging Dem senators to consider using the budget reconciliation process to pass a public option.
• Liberal bloggers (Marshall, Benen, Serwer, DougJ, Black) are criticizing Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ) for responding to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's support of a criminal trial for alleged 9/11 conspirators by saying, "Well, Mayor, how are you going to feel when it's your daughter that's kidnapped at school by a terrorist?"
• Conservative bloggers (Duppler, Lane, Reynolds, Morrissey) are mocking the Obama admin. now that it's been revealed that the recovery.gov website contains numerous errors.
• RedState and NRO both conducted interviews with ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin (R).

STUPAK: Is His Mouth Writing Checks That His Body Can't Cash?

Liberal bloggers are blasting Stupak for threatening "to defeat healthcare reform legislation if his abortion amendment is taken out":

• Balloon Juice's John Cole: "[W]hat really irritates me about this is that Stupak isn't concerned about the actual health care bill -- he's concerned with advancing his religious agenda through a health care bill, and if he doesn't get what he wants in the OTHER branch of Congress, he will work to blow up the whole bill. That is infuriating and wrong. Hell, I'd even understand it if pro-choice advocates had tried to advance the ball in the pro-choice direction, and Stupak said 'If they do that, I am voting against it.' But he isn't doing that, and what he is doing is much more extreme. He is going well beyond the Hyde amendment, and then threatening to blow up the bill if people don't follow through with his religious beliefs. He'd let tens of millions of people go without health insurance just because he couldn't for private insurance companies to no longer cover abortion. That makes him pretty despicable in my book. And the fact that the more conservative Senate Democrats aren't even going to give him the time of day tells you everything you need to know, if the Fox news appearances didn't already."
• Firedoglake's Attaturk: "Yes, [Stupak appeared] on Fox and Friends, the nation's premiere show for stories of Sarah Palin riding a dinosaur (the Palinolithic Era) before field dressing it -- it's full of meat after all."

Several bloggers think Stupak's threat is unrealistic:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "First, Stupak had claimed that he representing a voting bloc of 40 votes, but as of this morning, he believes his faction is made up of 'at least 10 to 15 to 20' House Dems who oppose abortion rights. For Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi and the House leadership, making up the loss of 40 votes is impossible to overcome. A 10-vote bloc represents a serious problem -- it would require some Dems who voted against the bill to change their minds -- but not an insurmountable hurdle. Second, Stupak's amendment appears to have no shot at all in the Senate. It would need 60 votes, and it probably doesn't even have 50. The one conservative Dem who seemed the most supportive of the measure has since reversed course."
• Firedoglake's David Dayen: "There's a huge difference between 10 and 20. In fact, only nine members who said they would vote down the bill without the Stupak amendment ended up voting for final passage. The rest of those members voted against the bill anyway. So 10 is probably the real number, as confirmed by [SC Rep.] James Clyburn last week. Chris Bowers has a target list for how to find those 8-10 votes if Stupak is stripped. And it's not at all clear that they could not be found. In fact, before the vote, Stupak HIMSELF said that health care would pass whether his amendment passed or not. And the votes don't look to be there in the Senate. Now that it did pass the House, Stupak thinks he can bully the Congress into keeping his language. I'm not convinced by his bluster."

Conservative bloggers are pleased about Stupak's campaign:

• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "Stupak says he has somewhere between 10-20 votes that would flip if they strip his amendment. That's a far cry from his 40 votes when he insisted on getting an up-or-down vote in the first place. It wouldn't keep the conference bill from getting passed in the House, but his activism on the issue may make it stickier for Democrats to do anything in the Senate to water it down. [NE Sen.] Ben Nelson has already demanded Stupak's language in the Senate bill before he'll allow it to proceed, which will infuriate other Senate Democrats like [CA Sen.] Barbara Boxer. Bottom line: this has created a fault line for Democrats that they didn't need in 2009, and they risk a bad split with Catholics over it, as Politico reports."
• RedState's Moe Lane: "Stupak claims to have more than enough votes to shut down any final version that removes his amendment, which is both false and true. It's false because the closeness of the original vote reflected a lot of horse-trading on the individual Member of Congress level; theoretically, the Speaker of the House could simply pressure the Democrats who got to vote 'no' last time to vote 'yes' this time. It's true because one of the reasons that they were able to get a final vote was because while the Stupak amendment was scored by NRLC, the final bill was not. Strip out Stupak, and a vote for health care rationing becomes a vote for federal funding of abortions. The NRLC pretty much cannot not score that appropriately."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: The Supermajority Requirement

The Washington Post's Ezra Klein:

"'For the final vote,' says [IN Sen.] Evan Bayh, 'I see no distinction between substance and procedure.' That is to say, if he decides to vote against the bill, he'll also vote against breaking a filibuster.

On some level, that makes sense. If you don't think a bill should become law, then it is arguably your responsibility to do everything in your power to keep it from becoming law. But if that's how the Senate is going to work from here on out, we should actually change the Senate rules to require 60 votes for the passage of any bill.

Let's end the confusion of the filibuster and the attempts to use budget reconciliation and the illegitimacy of procedural holds and the primacy of cloture votes and all the rest of it. If the Senate is to be a 60-vote body, let's have that debate, spin out the implications, and decide to change the rules of the place to make it a 60-vote body. As it stands, the United States Senate is functioning off the implications of a procedural loophole rather than the majority vote that its designers intended. If the current occupants believe another approach wise, they should make that argument on the merits rather than perverting the intent of the rules."

LEST WE FORGET: December Named National Awareness Month

From The Onion:

"WASHINGTON -- In an effort to combat what organizers are calling 'our current epidemic of complete and utter obliviousness,' the American Foundation for Paying Attention to Things has declared December 'National Awareness Month.'

'All across the country, millions of men and women are dangerously unaware,' AFPAT spokesperson Karen Teeling said during a press conference Monday. 'What's worse, the vast majority of those suffering from this debilitating state of mind don't even know it.' [...]

According to AFPAT, planned events for National Awareness Month include a 10K charity walk, during which participants will be forced to actually interact and engage with the outside world for a change, as well as several advertising campaigns, which will help get the word out about things other than what currently happens to be playing on television."