The New Health Dialogue

It’s a big weekend for snow -- and Snowe -- inside the beltway. We’re expecting to get snowed in on Saturday as a major winter storm hits DC. And according to The New York Times, the White House is getting Snowe-d in this weekend as well:

… consider how [Snowe] spent her Thursday: First she attended a meeting at the White House for roughly 80 to 90 minutes, a good portion of it one-on-one with President Obama. Later, she and Mr. Obama had a half-hour follow-up call. By any measure, that is a substantial chunk of the president’s day.

… In an interview with reporters at the Capitol on Thursday, Ms. Snowe described her conversations with Mr. Obama as productive. “They are helpful,” she said. “We have a chance to share our views. So I get a better understanding of his vantage point, his perspective, where he’s coming from on these issues, and likewise he gets to hear my concerns and what I’m thinking at this moment in time. It helps to keep those lines of communications open. We have good free-flowing, straightforward, constructive, productive conversations.”

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to extend COBRA benefits -- good news for the millions of families depending on COBRA coverage to maintain their health care coverage in tough economic times. Late last month, the $25 billion in COBRA subsidies provided by the economic stimulus package were close to running out. But thanks to the extension, the expiration date of COBRA benefits will be pushed back by an additional six months.

The ”mom” in me is often tempted to give the entire Senate a “time-out.” But Senate historian Donald Ritchie reminded me that the Senate isn't really behaving badly. It's just behaving like the Senate.

“It’s not dysfunctional. They are functioning. They just aren’t functioning in a pretty way,” he told me in a conversation this week.

Before calling Ritchie, we rummaged around the Senate web site for a filibuster refresher. Until 1917, the right to a limitless debate was just that: Limitless. Filibusters were unstoppable, as Henry Clay learned in the 1840s. Prodded by President Woodrow Wilson, who wanted a vote on the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, the Senate created what we now recognize as the cloture vote. Only in those days it didn’t require 60 votes to cut off debate or overcome procedural objections as it does today. It required 67.

It wasn’t easy to get two-thirds of the Senate to agree on anything, so cloture votes were rare. Filibusters -- good old fashioned stem-winding filibusters by the likes of Huey Long and Strom Thurmond -- were not common but they persisted right up through the famous (infamous?) ones of the civil rights era.

Like that time in the 6th grade when we saw Ashley at the mall with Josh just like two hours after her friend Tina told us things just weren't working out -- the only thing we want from health reform right now is closure, or at least a vote on cloture. Unlike Ashley, Harry Reid seems capable of giving us that.