Word: caucus
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Kratovil likes to note that he is the third most independent voter in the Democratic caucus and that he led a group that pushed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to delay consideration of the health-care measure until after Congress's summer break. But those modest achievements have yet to win him many converts, and for moderates and independents leery of government, health care has become a bright line...
...first course would make liberals in his caucus happier; the second would be preferred by moderates. But either way, the chances of a public option surviving in the Senate seem unlikely. If it is voted down, as expected, that may create an opening for Republican Senator Olympia Snowe - who is the only Republican still considering a yes vote on the health bill - to come in with her so-called trigger proposal to create a public plan as a fallback if private insurance companies do not do enough to bring down health-care costs. Snowe refrained from offering that amendment...
...bill forward that can garner majority support." Even progressives, more than 50 of whom had signed a pledge before the recess not to vote for any bill that did not include a public plan, have shown some willingness to bend on the issue - an indication of how spooked the caucus is by the summer theatrics. "I'm willing to look at the public plan if it means getting [Maine Republican Senator] Olympia Snowe's support for it to pass the Senate," says Representative Bill Pascrel, a progressive New Jersey Democrat. "But I'm leery about it - there better...
...industry that he notes is intimately linked to child prostitution and human-trafficking. "The buyers of commercial sex must be sensitized to the harm they cause women and girls and to the fact their money fuels modern-day slavery," Smith said at a joint briefing of the Congressional Caucus on Human Trafficking and the Congressional Victims' Rights Caucus in July 2009. "A cultural shift that recognizes the link between commercial sex and the trafficking of women and girls would starve the modern-day slaveholders. If potential buyers knew of the unspeakable lives of servitude and degradation these victims suffer...
...interview on Sept. 1, Grassley said, "I've gotten pleadings that we're helping the Democrats get a bill." But, he insisted, "my posture has been to take to the table things that my caucus has said they want health-care reform to be or not be." Among the demands that Grassley says he has made that reflect his commitment to conservative orthodoxy: no rationing of health care, no government-run public option to compete with private insurance, no requirement that employers provide health coverage and an insistence that malpractice lawsuits be curbed...