After I posted about the Senate health care bill yesterday, the Democratic leadership held a press conference in which he declared that he wouldn’t use the process of reconciliation to get the health care reform bill passed. But at the same time, it is unclear whether Majority Leader Harry Reid has the 60 votes he would need to bring the bill to the floor of the Senate for debate. As Greg Sargent reported at his Washington Post blog this morning, conservative Democrats are trying to use leverage their crucial vote to pressure Reid in order to get changes they want made to the bill.
Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the anti-choice Democrats in the Senate, said plainly that “he is not happy with the current abortion language in the Senate bill. But then he turned around and said that if his opposition to the public option is satisfied, it could help mollify him on the abortion question.” (Here is a helpful comparison of the House (Stupak) and Senate versions of the abortion provisions.)
It is still not clear what the anti-choice Democrats’ strategy is going to be. Kristen Day of Democrats for Life of America did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A few things, though, have become clear this week. Senators have been hearing a lot from the pro-choice side. David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism told me yesterday that “people were mobilizing to go to the ramparts in the mainline Protestant and Jewish communities” in opposition to Stupak-Pitts language ending up in the Senate or final bill, describing the mobilization as a “building crescendo.” That much was evident during a press conference earlier this week in which the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and other groups pledged to stop any further degradation of access to abortion in the Senate bill or in conference.
Meanwhile, a new poll from the Pew Research Center shows opposition to abortion funding ranking very low in reasons opponents of health care reform oppose passing legislation. The poll also found a 55% majority believes “abortion should not be included as a guaranteed medical benefit if the government health care reform plan passes.” But the way that question was framed doesn’t really resolve whether people are in favor of Capps or Stupak or some other mechanism. A September poll by the Mellman Group showed a majority in favor of the Capps amendment. In any case, though, very few opponents of health care reform are primarily motivated by opposition to abortion, and opposition to health care reform overall, according to this poll, has dropped.
As Jessica Arons of the Center for American Progress put it to me yesterday with regard to the abortion provisions, “are we trying to satisfy the moderates, or the extremists?”
