Bumped.

The House of Representatives is debating HR 2962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act today. In a nice touch, Representative John Dingell (MI-15) is presiding over the chamber. He was one of the architects of the original Medicare bill. President Barack Obama went to the Capitol this morning to urge House Democrats to pass the bill. The final vote is expected this evening, and most observers believe 218 votes will be found.

I'm not watching the House proceedings, but from what I read on Twitter and the blogs, House Republicans are heckling Democrats and making their usual outlandish claims about the bill. Representative Steve King (IA-05) organized another rally at the Capitol today to "kill the bill." Side note: King and other wingnuts blew off a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday to attend the "House call" wingnut rally against health care reform. Their absence doomed some Republican amendments to the PATRIOT Act reauthorization bill.

This thread is for any comments about the health care reform debate. I am upset that Representative Anthony Weiner (NY-09) was asked to withdraw his single-payer amendment from consideration, but Bart Stupak (MI-01) will be able to further restrict women's access to abortion services. That amendment would be a very bad deal for women. Now it's not just progressives, but half the population who will "take one for the team" so House leaders can pass a bill. I'm with Angry Mouse: this is not okay.

Meanwhile, a new poll from Virginia suggests opposing the public health insurance option was disastrous for Creigh Deeds.

According to Jane Hamsher, the AFL-CIO may cut off contributions to Democrats who vote against health care reform. A lot of Blue Dogs rely on organized labor to fund their campaigns.

What's on your mind?

Update [2009-11-7 16:27:3 by desmoinesdem]: The future of the State Children's Health Insurance Program is uncertain. As fairleft2 notes in this diary, the House bill moves children either to Medicaid or into private plans. It's not clear whether this provision could pass the Senate.

Update [2009-11-7 17:13:32 by Charles Lemos]:

Via the New York Times:

The House approved the rule governing debate of the big health care legislation by a vote of 242 to 192, suggesting but not guaranteeing that Democrats would have the votes to pass the bill itself later on Saturday.

Fifteen Democrats joined all 177 Republicans in opposition. One Democrat did not vote.

As a result the Democrats seemed to have a comfortable margin, with 24 more yes votes than they need for final passage of the bill.

The speaker pro tempore, Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, announced the tally.

The Democrats currently control 258 of 435 seats in the House, and with 218 votes needed to approve the bill, they can afford to lose 40 of their own caucus members and still win passage.

A final vote is expected on Saturday evening, but the process could take longer.

Update [2009-11-7 20:14:26 by Charles Lemos]: Via Politico:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to the House floor about 6:30 p.m. to say, “Today we will pass the Affordable Health Care for America Act.. . .We will make history. We will also make progress for America's working families."

In response to a question about whether the bill would pass when she brought it up, Pelosi told reporters Saturday night, "That is our expectation."

Thirty-two Democrats have publicly declared their opposition to the bill, giving party leaders the narrowest possible margin to push the bill across the finish line. But numerous sources said Democrats believe they do have the votes after a day of intense lobbying of wavering Democrats.

The vote is expected to take place around midnight eastern standard time.

The President went this morning to meet with members of the Democratic caucus of the verge of a historic vote. Thankfully, he seems to have abandoned his bi-partisan baggage.

From the Huffington Post:

In a final push to get health care reform through the House of Representatives, President Barack Obama warned lawmakers on Saturday that a vote against the legislation would not immunize them from Republican attacks.

The president, according multiple attendees, played the role of political prognosticator during his roughly 30 minute address before Democratic caucus members on Capitol Hill. Addressing, implicitly, those conservative Democrats who are worried about voting for a nearly trillion dollar health care overhaul, he insisted that they would not be safe from partisan attacks even if they opposed the bill.

"He certainly talked about the politics and he said that the Republicans want us to fail and no one should feel if they as a Democrat helped us to fail that they would be [free of their attacks]," said Rep. Henry Waxman, chair of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee.

"None of you can expect the Republicans not to go after you if you vote against this bill," Waxman continued, channeling the president. "They want this bill to go down for their own partisan reasons."

Another high-ranking Democratic Hill staffer briefed on the meeting put it this way: "Obama's main message was that the GOP won't go any easier on you if you vote against the bill. It's a tough vote, yes, but they're going to take heat either way."

While politics took up much of the discussion, policy took up very little. Obama, according to several lawmakers, did not talk about the public option or the controversial amendment to make abortion restrictions much tighter. He discussed, primarily, the momentous nature of the vote and the need for the party to be on history's right side.

"This is the moment," said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) That this is what we all went into politics for, that this was a historic moment, that seven presidents have tried to pass health care and haven't done it, and that this was a moment like civil rights or Social Security or Medicare."

In particular, Obama singled out Rep. John Dingell -- the longest serving member of the House -- who, on Saturday, presided over chamber for first time since the 1965 House vote to pass Medicare.

"He thanked all the chairs [of the committees involved in developing the health care bill]," said Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y). "He thanked all leadership and he mentioned specifically John Dingell."

The day of reckoning is at hand. For sixty years, the GOP has sought to delay this hour. As the President said, we are on the right side of history.

Enjoy.  

• The Tide is Turning in the Fight to Close Guantanamo. (Sharon Kelley)
• John Garamendi in CA-10: Sworn in and Looking forward to Voting on Health Care Reform.
• Tuesday's election was about governing, not politics writes John Russonello.
• UNITE HERE Local 634 Members Beat Back SEIU Raid By 2:1 Vote. (jre)
• Bruce Webb dissects the Boehner amendment in Sweatshop Insurance: O'Boehner Care & the Northern Marianas.
• Nonprofit Tech: Blogging for Immigration Reform in 2009. (The Opportunity Agenda)
• Daily Activist reminds us of the very human cost of our failed health care system in Why I Support Health Care Reform.

And votes are in on this week's most recommended comment thread, with a caveat from recommendees.  I quote: "It's a very worthy discussion spawned by a not so worthy diary." Join in.

For those not currently watching C-SPAN, which is recommended watching at present, the Republicans are trying to turn the House of Representatives into a zoo in an effort to impede debate over healthcare reform. At present, they are interrupting every short speech by a group of Democratic women legislators. The Joe Wilsonification of the GOP continues...

Take a look:

Update [2009-11-7 11:28:7 by Jonathan Singer]: My old boss Congressman Earl Blumenauer tweets:

Dingell in chair!!!! Finishing what his Dad started 60 years ago! 45 years after his leadership enacting medicare. Sweet!

It's pretty remarkable that the man who presided over the debate over Medicare in 1965 is now presiding over the debate over today's healthcare reform proposal.

Update [2009-11-7 17:35:8 by Charles Lemos]: Augmenting Jonathan's post, there is more on this story at Think Progress.

Earlier in my post on US Unemployment Reaching a 26-Year High, I said this about the U-6:

Among all groups, the U6 underemployment rate -- a broader measure of the jobs shortfall which includes people whose hours have been cut, those working part-time for lack of full-time work, and those who have given up looking -- is 17.5 percent. This is the number that I prefer to use as the real unemployment number. This reflects those individuals who can no longer find work in their chosen careers and have instead been forced back to school or to take lower paying jobs in the service sector. The lack of manufacturing jobs and a collapse in even high-paying white collar sectors such as finance and legal services poses a particular worry for the US economy and ultimately for the Administration.

David Leonhardt of the New York Times has some more color on our serious underemployment problem. Here are some of the lowlights:

In all, more than one out of every six workers -- 17.5 percent -- were unemployed or underemployed in October. The previous recorded high was 17.1 percent, in December 1982.

This includes the officially unemployed, who have looked for work in the last four weeks. It also includes discouraged workers, who have looked in the past year, as well as millions of part-time workers who want to be working full time.

The rate is highest today, sometimes 20 percent, in states that had big housing bubbles, like California and Arizona, or that have large manufacturing sectors, like Michigan, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

The new benchmark is a sign of just how much damage financial crises tend to inflict. A recent book by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, two economists, found that over the last century the typical crisis had caused the jobless rate in the country where it occurred to rise for almost five years. By that standard, the jobless rate here would continue rising for two more years, through the end of 2011.

Officially, the Labor Department's broad measure of unemployment goes back only to 1994. But early this year, with the help of economists at the department, The New York Times created a version that estimates it going back to 1970. If such a measure were available for the Depression, it probably would have exceeded 30 percent.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the left-leaning Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, today introduced legislation that would give the government the power to identify and break up financial firms that are "too big to fail."

The story from Reuters:

An independent U.S. senator on Friday introduced a bill that would give the government the power to identify and break up financial firms that are "too big to fail," an idea that is catching on.

"If an institution is too big to fail, it is too big to exist," said Senator Bernie Sanders in a statement.

"We should break them up so they are no longer in a position to bring down the entire economy," he said.

Sanders is an independent outside the U.S. political mainstream. But he is not the only one looking at break-ups.

Representative Paul Kanjorski, the Democratic chairman of the capital markets subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives, is working on a break-up power amendment.

It would give a new government systemic risk council break-up power, with clearance from the president.

"It's the natural action of capital to grow and exceed. Now we're going to contain it," Kanjorski told CNBC television.

He said large banks oppose his amendment because it would threaten them. But, he said, mid-sized and smaller financial institutions would be helped by it because they would be better able to compete if mega-firms were downsized.

"When the people's money is being used to bail out these large companies ... We certainly have to have someone to tell them what to do in order to save them," he said.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank said earlier on CNBC that a bill he is working on, which Kanjorski wants to toughen, would let a systemic risk regulator "break up" risky financial firms.

The Obama Administration has proposed regulating large firms' risk-taking much more tightly to prevent them from failing, while setting up new protocols for managing failure if things go wrong. Senator Sander's approach, however, would be to prevent the firms from getting so big in the first place.

The legislation introduced by Senator Sanders would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner 90 days to list commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and insurers that he deems too big to fail.

The bill defines that as "any entity that has grown so large that its failure would have a catastrophic effect on the stability of either the financial system or the United States economy without substantial government assistance."

A few quick thoughts. One, I think it important to separate investment banks from commercial banks. Two, exotic derivative products need to be regulated. At times it is difficult to tell the difference between Wall Street and the Vegas Strip. Three, don't allow commercial banks to grow via acquisition. Make them grow organically. That's part of the Canadian banking model and the Canadian banking model is worth studying closely. From an April 2009 Brookings Institution report:

In Canada, over-leveraging is discouraged. The ceiling on leverage ratios (assets to capital) for Canada's financial institutions is capped well below the U.S. norm (an average of 18:1 compared to over 25:1, respectively).

Second, the requirements for mortgage loans are relatively stringent. Down payments of at least 20 percent are ordinarily required, unless the bank obtains mortgage insurance through the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). The CMHC exerts a prudential influence over mortgage underwriting. Banks rely extensively on it for default insurance, which is conditioned on comparatively strict criteria for creditworthiness.

The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation transparently plays a role in circumscribing residential mortgage securitization. The great bulk of all lending in Canada takes place within the banking system itself, not through a largely unsupervised secondary market for bundles of loans and securities supposedly backed by other bundles of loans and securities--the "shadow banking system" - hedge funds and buy out firms - that has burgeoned in the United States.

Senator Sanders Unfiltered: Break 'Em Up!

Congressman Michael McMahon, the first term Representative from the NY-13 Congressional District that covers Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, will vote against the historic Democratic healthcare legislation that the House leadership intends to bring to floor as early as this weekend.

From Staten Island Live:

Rep. Michael McMahon will vote against the sweeping health care reform bill, in an expected House vote tomorrow, bucking the White House and Democratic congressional leaders who are heavily invested in seeing it pass.

"As a candidate for Congress in 2008, I ran on the platform of reforming our healthcare system while containing costs and improving access for Staten Islanders and Brooklynites," McMahon (D-Staten Island/Brooklyn) said in a press release. "This legislation contains laudable reforms which I support; it allows individuals to keep coverage when they leave a job and young people to remain covered under their parents' plan, and bans discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. However, I believe that the net negatives of this bill outweigh the positive effects for Staten Island and Brooklyn residents and I will be voting no when the House considers the legislation."

Sources said voters on both sides of the bridge are "overwhelmingly opposed" to the bill -- and have let McMahon know it.

At a raucous public forum he hosted here last month, dozens of agitated Islanders decried the bill as a form of socialism. Reaction in Brooklyn has been slightly less vitriolic, but nearly just as opposed.

A source said e-mails, phone calls and letters to McMahon's congressional offices have been running 60-40 against the bill.

McMahon, a first-term Democrat in what has been a reliably red Republican district, has had Tea Party protests staged across the street from New Dorp office on the issue.

I am surprised that e-mails, phone calls and letters to McMahon's congressional offices have been running 60-40 against the bill. You can contact Congressman McMahon here.

Congressman McMahon and 39 other Democrats can say no. Any more than that and we're sunk.

Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore has given an interview to the UK Guardian in which he expresses his optimism that the US will enact meaningful climate legislation.

He notes that "I was in China two days ago, and the premier of China asked me, in essence, why I'm optimistic that the Senate will pass legislation when the conventional wisdom says otherwise. And the answer is that I have been a part of conversations between Democrats and Republicans that give me a very different view from what the consensus is in the journalistic community." Gore then cites the recent op-ed by Democratic Senator Kerry of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Graham of South Carolina in the New York Times as evidence of wide bi-partisan support for climate legislation. He then added that "There are other surprises like that in store."

Even so, the former Vice President expects a hardening tone  from climate change deniers. He attributes this to "the sunset phenomenon, where there's a spectacle just before the subsiding": as the remaining climate change doubters and vested interests begin to realise that the game is up, he suggests, they're bound to make one last stand. "This self-interest on the part of some of the carbon polluters - who are becoming a bit intense in their efforts - reflects their awareness that public opinion has been shifting very significantly," he says. "When I say 'they', I don't mean to indict all of them, because the business community is now very much split... but that realisation has produced a desire on the part of some of these carbon polluters to dig in their heels."

Asked about the recent mass protests and civil disobedience for the climate across the world, Gore responded, "Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it."

The article is strongly recommended.