From a Washington Post news alert:

House Democratic leaders say they will take a separate vote on the Senate health care bill, rejecting an earlier, much-criticized strategy that would have permitted them to “deem” the measure passed without an explicit vote.

The Hill has more:

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said that Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won’t use the tactic of deem and pass for healthcare reform.
Instead there will be two separate votes, one on the Senate bill and one on the reconciliation bill.
Engel said that Pelosi told a whip meeting Saturday that members should be proud of their “yes” vote because it is as historic as the social security vote.

This is good news for the Constitution and transparency in government. I’m not sure if its good news for defeating Obamacare. In other words, the Slaughter Rule could have been a classic red herring, so that now the Democrats’ decision not to pursue it could be viewed as positively statesmanlike.

UPDATE: A senior GOP staffer on the Rules Committee e-mails me with this:

Very interesting. Not sure what this means about their vote count. They were clearly facing revolt on this, too. They must have decided to take care of the easy one first.

UPDATE II: Here is the statement from Rep. David Dreier (R., Calif.) ranking Republican on the Rules Committee:

“In the words of Ronald Reagan, ‘they may not have seen the light, but they certainly felt the heat,’” Dreier said. “The fact is, the Democratic Majority had no choice but heed the public outcry and abandon their effort to circumvent the democratic process. By even proposing the Slaughter Solution, they made clear they thought they knew best. But the American people made themselves heard and they won what is hopefully the first key victory in the healthcare fight. The fact remains that even without the Slaughter Solution, the American people will still reject the Democratic Majority’s march toward a government takeover of our healthcare system. No matter how they craft the rule, the only guaranteed outcome is that the bill everyone says they despise so much, the Senate-passed healthcare bill, is the one that will become law. The package of fixes may not fix anything and are almost sure to be changed in the Senate. Now, the Democratic Majority should abandon this entire process and start over, working with Republicans in a bipartisan way to achieve real healthcare reform.”