Are House and Senate Democrats really planning to debate healthcare for several more months? A knowledgable observer emails to say that it’s unlikely because any deal involving reconciliation needs to happen fairly quickly:
The current continuing resolution expires February 23 (or 24). Unless Congress wants to keep doing continuing resolutions (and thus funding Bush budget priorities and not Obama’s), they’ll need to get to get the 2010 budget done (via reconciliation). I would suspect that Feb 23 is the key date, not some spring or summer timeline.
Hmmm. I’m just tossing this out for comment since I don’t independently know what all the procedural hurdles are here. But if this is right, then the timeline for passing healthcare reform is actually fairly short unless the House is willing to pass the Senate bill based on assurances of doing something to modify it in the next budget year. That doesn’t seem very likely, though.
Further comments welcome from any congressional process nerds out there.
