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Breaking: Senate Democrats to Allow Early Vote on Health Care Repeal
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Original Message
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WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats, answering a challenge by Republicans pushing to overturn President Obama’s health care overhaul, said the Senate would vote soon, perhaps as early as Tuesday evening, on a repeal measure, and that they were certain that it would be defeated.
The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said he had put forward the repeal measure, which was approved overwhelmingly by the Republican-controlled House last month, as his first amendment to an aviation industry bill that was already on the Senate floor on Tuesday.
“We pledged to the American people that we would seek to repeal this 2,700-page bill that seeks to restructure all of American health care and put the decisions in Washington,” Mr. McConnell said at a news conference. “I’m pleased to announce that all 47 of my members will be voting to repeal Obamacare.”
The announcement of a showdown on the Senate floor came the day after a Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., ruled that the health care law was unconstitutional. The court said that Congress had exceeded its authority by requiring in the law that nearly all Americans to obtain insurance or face financial penalties, a provision generally known as the individual mandate.
The willingness of Senate Democrats to allow the repeal measure to come to a vote reflected two factors: a recent agreement among Senate leaders to avoid procedural gridlock and limit the use of parliamentary warfare, and the confidence among Democrats that the health care law would ultimately survive challenges both in Congress and in the courts.
The judge in Pensacola, Roger Vinson, ruled that the individual mandate provision could not be severed from the rest of the health care law, so it rendered the entire law unconstitutional.
[link to www.nytimes.com]
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