While the Senate Democrats were successful in garnering the needed 60 votes to proceed to the Health care bill in the Senate this past Saturday, this vote is only the beginning. When the Senate returns from their week long recess on Monday, Nov. 30, they will begin the amdt process. However, during this process, the Senate Majority Leader will need to muster a few more procedural votes requiring 60 Senators in order to continue the process. The vote held last Saturday night was the easiest of these upcoming procedural votes. The threshold on some of these other votes could be make or break for the bill language for subjects such as abortion, public option, DR panels and the like. Also, if the Senate is able to navigate thru these various subjects and achieve 60 votes, more of these procedural votes will be needed to send the bill to conference with the House. Since the Majority Leader began this debate using a shell bill and not the House passed Health care bill, the House will have to re-inject their language, in whole or in part, back into the bill language in order to get any of it under discussion during the conference process.

It is curious why the Leader didn’t initiate the Senate health care debate using the House passed bill. This writer believes he is keeping the House bill on the shelf and available it he fails to get the 60 votes needed during the long Senate process. If he fails to garner the necessary 60 votes, he will have a “plan B” to fall back on which is the reconciliation process. Remember, reconciliation only requires 50 votes in this current Senate and has a time limit of 20 hours for debate. It seems plausible that during this long amending process coming in the Senate, if the process breaks down in any way, the Leader will have a responsibility to use the reconciliation process to get some sort of bill passed. So while we all look forward the Thanksgiving holiday with our friends and family, this writer will keep an eye on the reconciliation ball that ultimately may be brought into play in order to complete the Health Care debate in Congress.

Elizabeth Letchworth is the Owner-Founder of GradeGov.com, 4 times elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority/Minority, U. S. Senate-retired, presently senior legislative advisor @ Covington & Burling, LLC