It's official: Harry Reid has corralled enough votes to bring his health-care-reform bill to the floor. Blanche Lincoln became the 60th Democrat committed to voting to allow debate to open on the bill, following her moderate colleague Mary Landrieu, who also announced today that she'd vote aye. But Reid still has his work cut out for him. This vote signals little about the ultimate viability of the bill. For all the furrowed brows and gnashing of teeth to get to today's 60 yes votes, this vote simply says that the Senate is prepared to have a debate on the bill. From here, the bill will be discussed and possibly amended. Then Reid must find another 60 votes to end the debate, and then he'll need at least 51 senators who want to vote the final product up. Clearly his work is far from over. This reluctance to even allow the bill to be debated—keeping in mind there will be two other opportunities to vote against it—illustrates the depth of moderate concerns.
Neither Lincoln's nor Landrieu's vote today comes with a guarantee that the senators will support the final bill. Both have expressed serious reservations about the legislation, particularly the inclusion of the opt-out public option. They might vote to amend the public option to a trigger version, or they might vote to strip it out of the bill entirely. It's unclear. But Landrieu offered one glimmer of hope to her liberal counterparts today, saying that on the public option she "would consider a principled compromise because I understand this is one of the issues we have to find a solution for or it could blow up the whole effort."
Reid also faces problems in the form of Ben Nelson, who will torpedo the bill if it doesn't contain stronger anti-abortion provisions, and Joe Lieberman, who said he'd join a Republican filibuster if the public-option provision isn't changed. So the bill still has a ways to go, but at least now the Senate will have an open debate about it.
