Pelosi signals renewed momentum for health care reform

From Greg Sargent:

This got a bit lost in the noise yesterday, because of the excitement in the runup to Obama’s speech and also because of some inaccurate reporting, but it’s important: Yesterday Nancy Pelosi strongly suggested there’s real momentum behind passing the Senate bill in the House with a reconciliation fix.

Pelosi met with a group of columnists yesterday and talked about the bill, and initial reports wrongly said she had flatly predicted she had the votes for passing the Senate bill as is. Then Pelosi’s office disputed that interpretation, and everybody more or less forgot about her comments.

But what she actually said is worth a look. A transcript is right here. Here’s the key bit, in which she addresses the likelihood of passing the bill if the Senate agrees to pass fixes to the billl via reconciliation, or what she calls “constitutional majority rule,” making the bill more palatable to House members:

“If there is a willingness for us to pursue with the constitutional majority rule, then I think we’ll be able to come up with something that sufficiently addresses the concerns of House Members of the policy in the Senate bill. All of this was agreed to, say a week and a half ago, and we’re pretty confident about going on a positive course there, because the changes were I think very important and we could make a case for them.”

By constitutional majority rule, I think she means a process by which 51 Senators vote up or down the legislation - e.g., reconciliation (or eliminating the filibuster).