Word: congression
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...love that too. Making health care available to everyone, even if some people - young, healthy people - who are not buying in now are told they have to join up, will also be well received. The odds are better than even that a bill containing those provisions will pass in Congress this fall...
...ultimate success of his presidency. It is his tendency to overlearn the lessons of past presidencies, especially when those lessons enable him to avoid taking responsibility for tough decisions. It has been widely observed that Obama overlearned the lesson of the Clinton health-care effort by deferring to Congress to write the legislation. It has been less widely observed that the President overlearned the lesson of Bush's hyperpoliticized Justice Department by leaving to Attorney General Eric Holder the decision about whether to investigate the CIA for torture abuses...
...Republicans might be persuaded to climb aboard. "Health care not only is 16% of the gross national product, but it touches the quality of life of every household as few others do," Grassley declared back in April. "I'm doing everything I can to make the reform effort in Congress a bipartisan...
...leaders are ready to write Grassley and the Republicans out of their plans for action in September and October. "If we can't do a bipartisan bill, we can do a partisan bill," says Senate majority leader Harry Reid. That may be harder than it looks. Though Democrats control Congress, it takes 60 votes to get past a filibuster in the Senate; with the death of Ted Kennedy, they have only 59. And holding the Democrats' own ranks is getting dicier, given the sinking poll numbers for both Obama and his health-reform effort - particularly among women and voters over...
...this ugly landscape, the White House has come to realize that the President himself is going to have to play a more forceful and direct role - and soon, including an address to a joint session of Congress on Sept. 9. Rather than leaving the legislative sausagemaking up to Congress, allies say, Obama will have to become far more specific about what he wants to see in a bill. He must spell out, for instance, precisely what he means by a public option, an issue that has grown to outsize proportion as an ideological flash point. The President may also need...