When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) said last week that she didn’t have the votes to pass the Senate health-care bill, as it stood, in the lower chamber, many of us took it as a strong sign that Obamacare was done for. But, alas, we underestimated the byzantine depths of Congress’s procedural playbook and the contortions to which Congressional Democrats are willing to subject themselves in an effort to pass the bill at any cost.

Democratic staffers are telling Newsweek that though Pelosi is still “way short” of the 218 votes it would take to pass the Senate bill — with issues such as the Cadillac Tax and Cornhusker Kickback serving as sticking points — that equation could soon change. Democrats are “working the phones furiously to talk up the idea of the Senate promising to retroactively unravel several distasteful components.”

If House Democrats make the good-faith deal, Pelosi is arguing that the Senate promise would be easy to keep. Reconciliation votes require only a 51-vote majority. Or even 50, in which case Vice President Biden could break the tie.
This aide says that leadership considers reconciliation, with the House conditioning its support on promised fixes in the Senate, as the much more strategic route than breaking the package into parts, which isn’t ideal because all of the parts are interlocking. Asked what the timetable would be for that, this aide says weeks, not months.

This is a live possibility. If the House passed the Senate version of the bill with an understanding that both chambers would then immediately pass a second measure functioning as a kind of substitute for a conference report, the president could easily sign both bills within the Constitutional window for action on legislation. And if balky House Democrats want more than a handshake, they could even demand the Senate passes the fixes first. All that matters is the order in which the president signs the bills.

The issue of the Cadillac tax is likely to be the biggest obstacle this maneuver on its substance. But equally problematic is the politics. Democrats rightly ruled out an attempt to ram a conference report through the Senate before Scott Brown could be seated as unseemly and willfully dismissive of the result in Massachusetts. What makes this bit of reverse-engineering any better?