How could reconciliation end up with an abortion time bomb?

Here's the nightmare:

1. The House passes the main Senate bill first, locking in (at least temporarily) the Cornhusker kickback, the Cadillac tax, etc.

2. The House passes the reconciliation fix and sends it to the Senate. But in order to get sufficient votes for it in the House, the leadership has to agree to put the Stupak abortion language in it, even though policy language like that is subject to a Byrd Rule point of order in the Senate, which would kill it. The House leadership sells it to the rank-and-file, telling them they've already voted for it once, anyway, and besides, it'll be killed in the Senate by the Byrd Rule, so don't worry about it.

3. The Senate takes up the reconciliation bill, and Republicans move to waive the Byrd Rule point of order against the Stupak language, which requires 60 votes to pass. But if they don't waive the Byrd Rule, then the reconciliation bill is amended, and will have to go back to the House. Either that, or the Senate will have to move to go to conference, and the motions necessary to do that can be filibustered up at up to three different choke points. So the Senate swallows the Stupak language (after heavy lobbying from the Catholic bishops), and it's done.

4. Unless, of course, the Senate decides to take a turn playing this game, and finds something it wants added to the reconciliation bill that maybe the House doesn't want, and puts that in the bill too, and sends it back to the House.

5. Then the House is faced with the choice of either swallowing the Senate provision in return, killing health care outright, or instead leaving the Cornhusker Kickback and Cadillac tax unchanged.

What do we do?

Looks like the "best" outcome here is passing reconciliation, including a waiver for Stupak. Which will mean that they will have waived the Byrd Rule to pass Stupak, but told the public option people to kiss off because of the Byrd Rule. There won't be much they could have done differently, but the base will, you know, not like that very much.

Who came up with this scenario? Not me. It was everyone's least favorite paper, Politicowho reported it first. Nor am I even the first one to blog about it. I know that coming from Politico makes it suspect for some of you, and others would even go so far as to say the same about Firedoglake, but the procedure is sound, even if the politics surrounding it are open to question.

Still, if the Senate becomes convinced that the only path to passage is to allow the House to have Stupak's language, then who are they to argue? They'll be convinced they're doing the only thing possible, and they may even be right.

Note, however, that this is not something that's necessarily solved by having the reconciliation bill taken care of first. I initially brought it up in that context, but only to hint at the sort of things that can be hidden until the last, most agonizing moment if the reconciliation bill is the last one to pass. Passing reconciliation first does nothing to avert this scenario, but it makes the bargaining plain and open: abortion rights as a trade for health care, or else scrap the reconciliation bill, take the arguably less-damaging Nelson language on abortion, and accept the Nebraska and Louisiana deals plus the Cadillac tax as the trade by passing the Senate bill in the House and calling it a day.

Would you rather have options, or not?

Article from Congress Matters read more here