Blog - Senate to Take Their First Health Care Votes on Thursday

After three full days of talk and no action, the Senate is finally set to take the first of what is expected to be dozens of votes on health care reform tomorrow. According to the Senate Democrats’ calendar, they will vote on the first four amendments — two from the Democrats and two from the Republicans. Two will be on the issue of women’s health care and mammograms, and two will be on the issue of Medicare funding.

Unfortunately, at 1:30 a.m. ET on the night before the votes, the text of the amendments listed on the calendar does not seem to be publicly available online yet (go here, click amendments) so there’s no way to be sure about what’s in them. Too bad the Republicans objected to Majority Leader Harry Reid’s [D, NV] rule to require all amendments to be posted online for at least 72 hours before being voted on…

The best we can do at this point is find some general information about the four amendments in press release from the four sponsoring senators — links: Mikulski, Murkowski, Bennet and McCain.

UPDATE, Thursday morning: The full text of the amendments have been added to the THOMAS website, you can see them here.

Related: check out this memo (.pdf) Sen. Judd Gregg [R, NH] distributed today to his Republican colleagues to remind them of all the procedural moves they have at their disposal to delay the health care debate. It includes things like requiring full bills to be read out loud, copious points of order “with or without cause,” and filling the amendment calendar with both germane and non-germane amendments.

I think it’s safe to say at this point that the health care debate is going to keep on rolling through Christmas and beyond.

The bright side: more time to read the bill!, which you can do right here at this link.