Blog - Articles Tagged 'Joe Biden'

We've been tracking the health care reform bill for more than a year on OpenCongress, but today our coverage of the bill takes a sharp turn. The health care bill, H.R. 3590, is Public Law No: 111-148. President Obama signed the bill into law this morning at 11:20 eastern, officially putting an end to the legislative process and transferring it into the process of being implemented by the states and the federal government. We'll be continuing to cover health care reform as it takes effect and the public debate evolves.

To clarify, the Senate is still working on finalizing an amendment to the health care bill, known as the Reconciliation Act of 2010, but regardless of whether that passes, health care reform has been entered in the Federal Register and will begin taking effect immediately. Here's a quick roundup of handy links.

All the health care buzz has centered around the budget reconciliation process, but Republicans are starting to realize that the truly important part of the process is whether the House can pass the Senate health care bill (H.R.3590).

The Republicans have opened fire on using the budget reconciliation process but a former Congressional official who knows reconciliation well says it's neither.

Wondering how we got from Sen. Scott Brown [R, MA] being elected in Massachusetts to kill health care reform to the health care bill, and maybe even the public option, being back on the table with a strong feeling of momentum behind it?

Vice President Joe Biden spoke yesterday at the National Defense University about the need to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons. A major tenet of the administration's nuclear weapons agenda is to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, which Biden believes is necessary to preserve global security: The Treaty’s basic bargain - that nuclear powers pursue disarmament and non-nuclear states do not acquire such weapons, while gaining access to civilian nuclear technology - is...