Pelosi bet political life on health care victory
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was beaming last week after the House narrowly approved landmark health care legislation that she fought relentlessly to move forward.
WASHINGTON – Reps. Doris Matsui and Dan Lungren are polar opposites on Capitol Hill, but they agree on one point: House approval of a trillion-dollar health care overhaul marked a victory for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
"She is the central player in this. … I don't think anyone else could have done this," Matsui, a Sacramento Democrat, said Thursday.
Lungren, a Republican from Gold River, called it "a Pyrrhic victory" for Pelosi: "She won that battle, but she may inevitably lose the war. She pulled out all the stops."
Love her or hate her, Pelosi is at the peak of her political power.
Last week, as she searched for the 218 votes required to pass the mammoth health care bill, she made her view of the stakes clear: "We have an historic opportunity. ... It is something that many of us have worked our whole political lifetimes on."
And on Saturday night, after the House of Representatives passed Pelosi's bill with two votes to spare, no one was smiling more broadly than the 69-year-old Pelosi.
It won't be known for weeks whether Pelosi can help get a bill through the Senate and to the president's desk and whether the compromises the House made on abortion will help or hurt that effort, but she had much to celebrate with her preliminary victory, including her own political survival.
For starters, she'd withstood withering attacks and TV impersonations and had overcome many doubters, laying her reputation on the line as she guaranteed that the House would pass a health care bill.
She stood firm, predicting from the beginning that the House would include a public option as part of its bill, even when the prospects appeared to be fading fast in August.
Before the House voted to approve its bill, Pelosi angered many of her fellow abortion-rights supporters by allowing a vote on an amendment that would restrict the availability of abortion coverage. Under the amendment, insurers could not sell policies that cover abortion to anyone who gets a federal subsidy.
Much to the chagrin of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, the amendment passed.
On Thursday, Colorado Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, co-chair of the caucus, said she has gathered 41 signatures from House members who are pledging to vote against the health-care bill if the abortion language is not removed in a conference committee.
"It's a huge expansion of restrictions on comprehensive reproductive coverage," DeGette said, adding that she does not blame Pelosi: "I don't think it's the speaker's fault."
DeGette and others said Pelosi made the call to allow the vote on the amendment after it became clear that it was the only way to get the broader bill passed.
"I think it was a surprise that it came to that point," Matsui said. "But I think that's the only way she could have handled it. She's pro-choice herself."
The fight will now move to the Senate. California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer said she has already met with Democratic female senators to discuss the best way to proceed to defeat the abortion amendment.
"We are optimistic that compromise will prevail," she said.
As Congress heads to a possible finish line on health care this year, Pelosi is hoping to deliver the largest expansion of health care since Congress created Medicare in 1965.
She has much work to do before she can claim success, however, and there will be plenty of opportunities for opponents to derail the House bill.
First the Senate, where there are great ideological differences, must pass a bill, and then a conference committee must meld the House and Senate bills. Depending on what emerges, it may be difficult for Pelosi to get her troops to sign off on a final version, particularly given the Democratic resistance on the first vote.
Pelosi's main task will be to keep her delicate Democratic coalition intact.
She prevailed in July, when members of the Blue Dog coalition rebelled against the public option. One of the biggest ironies: Pelosi had produced a winning strategy by helping recruit many of the conservative Democrats to run in Republican-leaning districts in 2006 and 2008.
Leading one of the hottest domestic debates to hit Washington in years hasn't come without a price, though. Pelosi's job approval ratings have sunk dramatically this year, even in California, as she gets much of the blame for public dissatisfaction with Congress and the gridlock on Capitol Hill.
Lungren said Pelosi is hurting her party by forcing conservative Democrats to vote for the health care bill, which he said remains unpopular in many moderate districts.
"She just tends to overreach," he said. "She tends to pull her party far more to the left than is necessary. And ultimately, that hurts the party. Because she is an accurate reflection of her district, but her district is not an accurate reflection of the rest of America. ... Her internal compass doesn't tell her she's going too far."
Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, said passage of the bill was historic and "the result of months of building consensus."
Asked to respond to Lungren's remarks, Hammill said: "The trademark of the speaker's leadership has been achieving consensus among our diverse body of members. The speaker will continue to listen to all views as we continue our work to get this bill to the president's desk."
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